Upheaval - Frances Bukovsky
Upheaval
Frances Bukovsky
I began photographing Upheaval while seaching for a home, both within my own body, as well as the world around me. After experiencing a series of life rupturing medical and personal events, I found myself in a period of transition, physically and relationally, and photography became a tether for me to grasp. Set in Appalachia between my hometown and my chosen home, Upheaval revisits childhood memories and forges new connections between body and geography to assemble a sense of self informed by cycles of grief and upheaved circumstances.
Rather than depicting a journey towards a healed state after trauma and acute illness, Upheaval meditates on the ways that grief lives within my body by returning to repeated visual motifs and gestures in documentary and self portrait photography. Lumen prints of medical ephemera introduce chronic illness into the work as a backdrop that informs images that may not otherwise be read in a medical context. Upheaval points to a continuous process of transition in the relationship between my body and the world I live in.
Frances Bukovsky (b. 1996 they/them) makes images about the relationships between bodies, environments, and identities informed by their lived experiences of illness, disability, and queerness. Raised in rural New York, Bukovsky earned a BFA in Photography and Imaging from Ringling College of Art and Design in 2018. Since then, Bukovsky has been actively showing their work in venues such as the United Nations Headquarters in New York City, The Bascom: A Center for the Arts, TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image, and Circle Gallery at University of Georgia in Athens. In 2020 Bukovsky published their debut monograph “Vessel” with Fifth Wheel Press. Bukovsky is a founding member of Kinship Photography Collective and a member of Women Photograph. Bukovsky lives in Marshall, North Carolina.
Instagram: @Frances_Bukovsky
