J'S THEATER: Krista Franklin's Stick & Move Show

Last night I headed down to Wicker Park to check out the opening Krista Franklin's new show, "Stick and Move" at the Silver Room. As the folks like to say, Krista has obviously been "in the laboratory," and had a number of new pieces, as well as many old favorites, on display. Several of them had sold before the evening was even half over. The associative logic of her collages has struck me as inherently intuitive, but her pieces succeed because of her growing assurance with composition, as well as her grasp of the poetry created by certain types of image-text juxtapositions. Her sense of color has always been a feature of her work, and in many of the works on display, it's adroitly conveyed. One of my favorite pieces is the cover image on poet Linda Susan Jackson's just-published book of poems, What Yellow Sounds Like (Tia Chucha). Her visual art, like her poetry, has also appeared in periodicals and has graced the covers of collections by Jacqueline Jones LaMon (Gravity USA) and Tyehimba Jess (Leadbelly). As these names make clear, the Cave Canem family thinks highly of Krista's artwork, and many CC folks were present throughout the night. But a broad sampling of Chicago's poetry and arts communities came out, and I'm posting some of the photos I snapped below.