Cherry Hill: A Childhood Reimagined<\/em> (Monacelli Press, 2020), after the New Jersey town where Frank grew up in the 1960s and \u201870s, as well as sculpture, video, embroidery, and wallpaper design. She parses a life, re-creating memories and relaying archetypal family narratives. The gallery exhibition, an abbreviated version of a 2022 museum show at Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Maine, tells a fractured story of Frank\u2019s coming of age in a white, middle-class Catholic home. The Frank family struggled with mental illness and that mid-century specter (particularly for young women): conformity. Most of the photographs are staged re-creations. In the cinematic mode of artists including Gregory Crewdson, Jeff Wall, Diana Markosian, and Alex Prager, Frank revels in creating sets and directing actors \u2013 Laura Dern, in several conspicuous wigs, plays her mother, while Frank as a child and adolescent is portrayed by a succession of young women. Other references include Larry Sultan\u2019s Pictures from Home<\/em>, 1992, and Yasumasa Morimura\u2019s English Major<\/em>, 2018, in which a young actress in a white wig slips into a queen costume in a historic painting.<\/p>\n\n\n\nJona Frank, Almost At Goodbye<\/i>, 2018. Courtesy Euqinom Gallery<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n The settings are highly art-directed, with re-created wallpapers and vintage objects. (Frank also includes a miniature slide show of actual family photos projected inside a dollhouse sculpture, merging the real with the constructed.) For a 2016 photograph documenting a moment of childhood humiliation involving a toppling tower of Lucky Charms cereal boxes, Frank constructed 100 cereal boxes and shot the scene in a grocery store with fluorescent lighting and period-specific posters. In Mirror, Mirror<\/em>, 2018, Dern (as the mother) and her young daughter pose in matching red dresses, holding pies, in a 1960s ranch house kitchen. Such pictures are not meant to be convincing as actual events \u2013 their artifice is glaring \u2013 but suggest the mutability of memories into tropes of film and fiction recognizable to many viewers. <\/p>\n\n\n\nJona Frank, Lucky Charms<\/i>, 2016. Courtesy Euqinom Gallery<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n The sculptural objects, which include a quartet of faux-frosted birthday cakes decorated with the show\u2019s title in sugary script, add a degree of funhouse playfulness. Every 30 minutes, a wall-mounted rotary phone rings three times, in the spirit of Yoko Ono\u2019s Telephone Piece<\/em>, 1964. This audible gesture has a way of jolting us out of the story and marking the passage of time. Perhaps because this exhibition was culled from a larger body of work, the selection feels disjointed. The mixture of different visual styles and forms, re-creations and authentic artifacts, muddle the message, though perhaps also reflect the complexity of memory, which is never as clean or as accurate as we\u2019d like it to be. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jona Frank\u2019s polymorphous memoir project is a remembrance of a very American childhood. Rooted in photography, You Are Not Enough, on view through July 8, includes a full-length book titled Cherry Hill: A Childhood Reimagined (Monacelli Press, 2020), after the New Jersey town where Frank grew up in the 1960s and \u201870s, as well as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":18303,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"15059,6836,7268,7372,7257,6405,22944,6760,6558,7345,7293,26206","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[5509,5507,5109,5506,5511,5510,5505,5325,5508],"issues":[5473],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18452"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18452"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18452\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18791,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18452\/revisions\/18791"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18452"},{"taxonomy":"issues","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issues?post=18452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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