Frankie Rice’s The Arches is at once a dirge and a love song, in a way that a discussion of sex and death can only be in 2019.
Including works created at various points over the last twelve years, Rice invites the viewer to peer through a series of figurative windows, sharing brief glimpses of pivotal moments in the journey from a person newly diagnosed with HIV to one enjoying the freedom and hope that access to life saving treatment and pre-exposure prophylaxis has brought. At once deeply personal, but also relevant to an entire generation for whom the distant memory of idealized free-love before the AIDS epidemic has a candy-coated sense of the surreal, Rice’s works are a reminder that everything shifts with time.
It is no accident that throughout the many years of his practice, Rice has chosen the curving shape of a open doorway or window to mold again and again. In 2012 Rice conducted his first solo exhibition with the gallery, exhibiting a single trash can archway in the center of the exhibition space. Repeatedly used over the years, the archway has come to be the ultimate symbolic representation of transition and change in Rice’s work, one that can speak of figuratively passing through time as if it were literal space.
Included in this show are Rice’s shining stone archways, laboriously carved out of granite. While less literally a reference to HIV than the pill bottle pieces, they are also a paean to the power of time to transform. Displayed side by side with archways made out of Truvada bottles, a medication which in the last few years has transformed the lives of millions as it became available for pre-exposure prophylaxis and thus went a long way to de-stigmatize HIV infection, the stone archways become even more poignant. Both figuratively and literally, Rice juxtaposes his pill bottle sculptures with the soaring granite archways,doorways cut through impossibly hard stone and polished to a glass-like shine.
In a world that has borne witness to the terror wrought by the AIDS epidemic, sex and death will always be closely linked. And Rice’s work reflects that, but at the same time it comes from a place of strength. One can imagine stepping through one of his archways into a future world in which the immortality that artwork bestows upon its creator transcends all else.
LAUNCH F18 is delighted to present The Arches, a solo exhibition by Brooklyn, NY and Cape Cod based artist, Frankie Rice. The exhibition opens on Saturday, October 26 from 6-9 PM and is on view through November 30, 2019. The Arches marks the second solo exhibition by the artist with the gallery.