How contemporary artists are turning the frame into a medium of its own | Canada Voices

In Phương Nguyễn’s exuberant pieces, it’s hard to know where the work ends and the frame begins. For the last few years, the Toronto-based artist has surrounded her work with increasingly fantastical details in ornately sculpted wood and ceramic. These “frames” not only complement her subject matter but become part of the narrative.

Nguyễn says that she began focusing on making frames for her pieces after experimenting with shards of pottery that a business in Toronto’s Chinatown was poised to throw away. Nguyễn now uses everything from vibrant viscose twine to freshwater pearls to add adornment to the frames, taking them into a dimension beyond the historic relationship between an artwork and its mounting. “I’m at a point where my work feels a bit more expansive,” Nguyễn says about the relationship her hand-made, suggestive frames have with her still life and figurative paintings.

Nguyễn isn’t alone in exploring how framing is crucial to making an artwork work. New York-based Ben Cowan’s oeuvre includes architectural framing that amplifies the details of his spiritual and botanical oil works. At Stephanie Temma Hier’s recent show, Swan Song, at Anton Kern Gallery in Manhattan, the artist showcased idiosyncratic paintings delineated by textural frames featuring glazed stoneware sculptures of shoes, a rose-festooned trellis, and the titular bird in an evocative pose.

Closer to home, Montreal’s Maude Corriveau experimented with shapely frames to suit a series of sensuous pastel works in an exhibition called Contours. For the Salon 44 fundraiser benefitting the artist-run centre Gallery 44, Hannah Doucet crafted a frame out of printed, three-dimensional gloves that cradled a photo. And Calgary-based interdisciplinary artist Marigold Santos’s two most recent shows at Patel Brown Gallery in Toronto have featured spellbinding frames fabricated by Santos’s partner, Yarko Yopyk.

“Her paintings are compelling, concentrated, and confident, and so are her framing selections,” says Patel Brown’s gallery director, Jennifer Simaitis. “The stain and grain of the frames often mimic the colours and mark-making found within the works themselves.”

The increased attention paid to framing is something Sonja Scharf, co-creative director of Akasha Art Projects Inc. in Toronto’s Cabbagetown neighbourhood, enjoys. While she notes that Toronto’s taste for framing has generally been on the milder side, she and partner Kelly Kyle have worked with both artists and clients to achieve some remarkable and boundary-breaking results.

Scharf notes that while some framing should play a supporting role to the artwork’s central function, the more integral – or influenced – by the art the frame is, the more compatible, and perhaps inseparable, it will become. For one client, Akasha’s team used a glossy textured black frame to pick up on the mosaic embellishment of a mixed-media work. Scharf says that it was like “a marriage” rather than the art being the main attraction.

“Framing is increasingly a considered choice rather than an afterthought. Collectors are more adventurous, often collaborating with artists, galleries, and framers to select options that both protect the work and reflect the personality of the space it inhabits,” Simiatis says. “There are far more possibilities than just white or black frames, and a home doesn’t need to feel sterile or museum-like. As long as it honours the artwork, I say have fun with it – framing should combine form and function.”