At Home with War
Oct. 12 - Nov. 12, 2024
At Home With War, collage works by A. Franzen-Sheehan
Artist Reception, Saturday, October 12, 2024, 5- 8 pm
Double Dog Studios, 317 Second Avenue, Carnegie, PA 15106
Exhibit runs October 12 - November 2, 2024
Abby Franzen-Sheehan (AFS) is an artist and designer with decades of experience in studio practice, graphic design, museums, and art publications. As a professional artist exploring the nexus of feminism, politics, and history, she has created paintings, prints, collages, and sculptures that examine the complexities of faith and reality as constructed by human experience. She is greatly influenced by poetry, philosophy, religious thought, and intuitive insights.
At Home with War features Franzen-Sheehan’s silkscreen prints and mixed-media collages. The works explore human proximity to difficult things—a near and far relationship to violence in America and the world. Franzen-Sheehan references domestic spaces erected to nurture life while simultaneously distancing those within from the barbarity of ever-present warfare. The work examines the perpetual desire to be better than we find ourselves and the search for divine intervention into the human condition of perpetual strife.
Franzen-Sheehan’s collages are made from layers of silkscreen prints on paper, fabric, and other materials. The sources for the prints are from computer-manipulated images appropriated from old engravings, maps, illustrations, and games. These sources reference a wide range of subjects, including the medieval crusades, wars in Europe, the American Civil War, biblical stories, creatures from folklore and myths, and children’s songs and stories.
