Project Room: Franklin Preston

Franklin Preston is a multidisciplinary artist who comes primarily from a background in painting. He works with imagery and objects drawn from the diversity of global postpop culture. These elements at the core of his work emerge as reverberations of the mutations and crises of postindustrial technocapitalist society. This project focuses as a reflection on the formation of value systems, in particular the arragements of desire within urban youth culture. In examining video games subcultures, perhaps the only true global youth culture today, Preston investigates the tendency among youth to internalize the structure and codes of technology. By so doing he portrays how youth see the world as a series of strata in terms of getting to the next level, and simultaneously win the accompanying wealth and privilege of each level.

Preston’s installation consists of paintings and sculptures that interpret these topographies of power and desire. The installation utilizes youth tribe symbolic-acronymic visual codes and languages such as graffiti, with which to constrict an elusive system of poetic indicators for this very audience.