Congratulations to Frank Geiser for earning his place as a Finalist in the Boynes Artist Award 8th Edition [Professional Artist category]!

Who are you?

My name is Frank Geiser. I am twenty-seven years old, and I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I currently live in Matteson, Illinois, and I teach art and design at Purdue University Northwest. I’ve known that I wanted to be an artist since I was in high school, but how I think about being an artist has definitely changed over time.

My introduction to art was through painting. I started taking classes in drawing and painting when I was thirteen years old, and quickly grew attached to oil painting. In high school I decided this was what I wanted to do with my life, and I ended up getting a scholarship to attend Xavier University for my BFA. I have an amazing family, and I don’t think I would have even made it that far without their support.

At that time, I was mostly interested in painting people, but I took a darkroom photography class as a sophomore and fell completely in love with the medium. I ended up getting my BFA degree with concentrations in both painting and photography, and to an extent I still think about myself that way. I’ve found it difficult to work in painting since my undergraduate studies, but the foundation is still there.

I also got a fellowship with Xavier University’s Brueggeman Center for Dialogue, which funded travel for the creation of a photo series documenting the lives of monks, babas, and other ascetics around the world. It seems like a weird topic to study, but I was drawn to the idea of solitude and contemplation in these spaces. I wanted to experience how those ideas are understood in different cultures, and I think about that series, now titled Lots of time to read, as research which informs my gallery-based works.

How do you describe your artwork and communicate your intended message to the audience through your installation/sculpture work, and how does your use of multiple mediums contribute to this?

I recently had a great conversation with another artist where I was asked to describe my artistic practice in one word, and I chose “contemplation.” I want my artworks to create experiences where viewers can slow down and appreciate things at their own pace. I find it easiest to do this using the visual language of installation, even when I’m making discrete works.

I got a scholarship and teaching stipend to attend the University of Kentucky for graduate school, and I knew I wanted to use my time there to try new approaches in my artwork. In my first semester of grad school, I told my committee I was interested in light, space, and time, and one of my advisors laughed and asked me if it was possible to be more broad! Nonetheless, I’ve always been drawn to wrestling with big, existential questions that don’t have a defined answer. Who am I? How do I understand my purpose in the world? What does it mean to connect with another person? How do my thoughts about life and death shape the things I create? I think many artists find a specific thing they are drawn to that then connects back to big concepts in their practice, but for me it usually starts with the big concepts and questions I want to engage with and slowly becomes more specific. It might be hard for people to see the connecting threads between all the different things I do as an artist, but I like to think if someone put it all together in a room somewhere it would feel connected.

I’ve always been a tinkerer, and this has resulted in a general curiosity about how things around me work. In grad school I wanted to learn about circuits and electronics, and I focused in on creating light-based work. The first circuit I made was a little blinking LED light controlled by an Arduino, and that little blinking light has stuck with me. I think it’s a similar experience to the first time people see “hello world” printed on their screen when they learn computer coding. There’s a presence to it.

What was your inspiration and thought process behind your finalist work, and can you share your biggest learning experience during the creation process?

It’s a long story! Radiation Cathedral is an artwork I made for my MFA thesis, but its origins begin way back in undergrad. I was learning about film photography, and I really liked shooting with slide film. It had these really vibrant colors, and I love that when you’re looking at a slide it isn’t a print or a copy: That little piece of acetate was there with you when you took the picture. Anyways, I came across the opportunity to buy some really old, expired slide film, and I was excited because it was a type of film they don’t make anymore! I loaded up my Pentax 35mm camera and shot a whole roll of pictures during a visit back home. This roll was going to be a little collection of the most important things in my life: I took pictures of my family, my friends, my girlfriend (now wife), sentimental objects, anything I felt intensely connected to. My excitement was completely dashed when I got the roll back after processing, and it was completely blank. I felt like these important things had been erased to some extent.

I recall being tempted to throw out the roll, but I held onto it. Over time I did some digging into what caused the roll to be blank, and I learned some cool things about film that not many people think about. When people talk about taking pictures with expired film, they often talk about color shifts, weak contrast, and other wonky effects, but I think there’s a broad misunderstanding about why these things happen. Most people assume the chemistry of the film has gotten old and caused these abnormalities in the image. For certain types of film this is definitely true, but the chemistry in slide film is actually very stable. With really old slide film, a bigger factor is actually exposure to background atmospheric radiation–it’s similar to how film can get exposed by x-rays. Background radiation is really weak, but over the course of decades it can expose the film just as surely as holding it up to a lightbulb. Processing the film then develops this exposure, and different types of film turn different colors depending on their chemical composition.

Sorry for the long technical explanation, but when I learned this, I was amazed!

The color on my roll wasn’t the result of bad chemistry, in a way it was a photograph of the past couple decades! I started collecting more and more of this expired film whenever I could, and I had my film lab develop some blank rolls. Sure enough, they came back with similar colors to my earlier roll. More experiments led to the conclusion that different types of film consistently produced certain colors. I started thinking about this film material in a couple different ways: Its transparency made me think about stained-glass windows, and the process of slowly changing color made me think about leaves changing color in the fall. Radiation Cathedral was an idea that became a bit of both. All of the film in the sculpture was developed blank, it was important to me that I didn’t modify the film in any way before it was developed. I usually just sent the film to the lab still in its original box, which threw my film-processing guy for a loop the first time I sent him an order to develop blank film!

This process of making this artwork provided a great lesson on the importance of investigating the materials I work with. What was initially a failed roll of film became the inspiration for a whole series of work. It isn’t an instantaneous process, but I feel like most artistic failures coalesce into something beautiful with thoughtful persistence.

Can you walk us through the technical steps of creating "Radiation Cathedral"?

Absolutely! I designed a rose window pattern with a sort of tree-shaped base that fit that form in a 3D modelling program. I was then able to export geometry from this model and use it to cut out forms from wood, plastic, and metal using a bunch of equipment I had access to in grad school. With a laser cutter, a CNC plasma cutter, and a CNC router I was able to cut out all the pieces I needed to make the structure of the artwork, which was then glued, welded, stapled, sanded, and screwed together. Because all the cutting vectors came from the same file, it all fit together perfectly. It stands about 8 feet tall in its completed form!

Of course, the structure of the work isn’t where most of the time making this sculpture was spent. The majority of my time went into cutting and soldering the film into leaf shapes and assembling everything with wiring to power the LEDs in the sculpture. The film is lined with lead and soldered together like stained-glass. I actually had to be extremely quick and precise when soldering, or it would melt the film!

Can you discuss your biggest success since starting your artistic journey?

The process of making work is amazing, but I also find a lot of joy in sharing what I’ve learned with other artists. It's why I enjoy being a teacher despite how stressful it can be. I’m proud of the work I’ve done as a teacher so far: I taught classes at the University of Kentucky in grad school, and I adapted to the Covid-19 pandemic as a new instructor. Then I got a teaching job as an adjunct at Purdue University Fort Wayne after graduating, and I recently got hired to teach full-time at Purdue University Northwest. I consider the biggest successes in my artistic journey so far to be moments where students have come up to me at the end of the semester and told me that my class had an impact on them.

Another big moment for me was selling one of my installation pieces and a bunch of photographs in grad school. It doesn’t sound particularly crazy, but that sale was the down payment on my truck.

I think it’s important to talk about privileges and support any time I talk about my successes. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have a strong support system around me as I try to make a career out of being an artist. Too often, artists who make amazing work don’t get the support they need to pursue an arts career solely because they haven’t benefited from the same privileges that I have. It’s on all of us to uplift each other, especially when many of the voices in our diverse community aren’t being listened to.

Can you give us a piece of advice you wish you had known at the start of your career?

The art world you fall in love with in museums isn’t the one you live in. You’ll have to convince people that what you do is important–it doesn’t come in neatly packaged linear timelines with museum scholarship explaining your contributions. You’ll have to do the best you can to keep making work you think is important, and oftentimes this means making slow, steady progress towards your goals instead of burning out.

Learning some art history is still a great idea though!

What projects are you working on currently?

I’ve put up some mental barriers between the different mediums I work in that I’m working on dismantling. I’m hoping to bring installation work, photography, and drawings together in a new series I’m working on. When I was younger I had a lot of anxiety and panic attacks, and I’ve recently been investigating those feelings and their relationship to my obsession with contemplative spaces. It’s all a little abstract at the moment, so no sneak peeks to share just yet, but I’m excited by the early stages of stuff I’ve put together!

What is your dream project or piece you hope to accomplish?

I think my series Lots of time to read would be an excellent book, and I hope to publish it someday! I’m not sure when that someday will be, as I don’t think I’ll be finished with that series anytime soon, but I feel optimistic it will happen eventually.

From the gallery side of things, I would love to create a permanent installation of an artwork I made in grad school called “There are fewer stars now than when I was little.” It’s a piece that I’ve made several versions of at this point, but I think it would be fantastic as a big, immersive installation somewhere that it could exist for a while.

As a finalist, do you have any advice for artists who want to submit to awards, competitions, residencies, etc.?

Don’t let juries define your self-worth.

Lastly, I like to ask everyone what advice they would give to their fellow artists/photographers, what is your advice?

I would say joy and healing are the two most important things your practice can offer you. Leave space in your practice for both amidst all the chaos.

To view more of Frank Geiser’s work

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