New Edition

Limeflower Heterodoxy is a new 24/7 livestream and video work by artist Sharona Franklin featuring the slow decomposition of one of her signature gelatin sculptures between June 9 and July 3 2020. The work comes at three different tiers: an unlimited livestream access, a 30min time lapse video filmed on Hi8, and a high resolution 60min video with textile edition.

With this work, Franklin takes the viewer into an exploration of healing methodologies, contrasting the different approaches of psychedelic and plant-based medicine intertwined within the pharmaco-industrial complex. The livestream surveils the work, mimicking the way those who are bureaucratized, medicalized, and institutionalized exist in disempowered states with precarity to medical resources. Franklin explores childhood illness and alien—and often dehumanizing—experiences of cytotoxic and pharmaceutical systems. Referred to by the artist as bioshrines, the sculptures embody tensions and contradictions held for those whose treatments include both natural medicine and—sometimes ethically controversial—biopharmaceutical care.

COVID Bail Out NYC will receive 100% of the profits from Limeflower Heterodoxy II. Initially, 20% was going towards SIQ—a group of disabled artists & activists advocating for community members affected by COVID—who are now diverting their portion in solidarity. COVID Bail Out NYC is an organization that works to “bail out our Black & brown siblings in NYC jails, prioritizing those who are medically vulnerable.”

This installation is hosted at grunt gallery in Vancouver and produced with the support of Vivo Media Arts Centre.

View all of Sharona Franklin’s editions here.

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Transgenic Test Subjects

Transgenic Test Subjects is a digitally printed textile work produced as a sculptural element for Limeflower Heterodoxy. Franklin uses images of mice as an entry point through which the viewer steps into a world of discourse surrounding the vulnerability of children and animals, medical consent, and the ethics of biopharmacology. The text on the border reads: “The rats and mice bloom very rich internal lives, not unlike our human cells.” Throughout the installation, the gelatin will decay and drip onto the velvet work, marking elapsed time, and evidencing the textile’s role within the bioshrine.

Sharona Franklin b. 1987 is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist, writer and advocate. Her work explores radical therapies, cybernetic craft, ecological systems, bio-ritualism, pharmacological and social inter-dependency disseminating mythologies of class and biocitizenship within disability. Franklin’s visual media practice can be viewed through social media platforms @paid.technologies, @star_seeded and @hot.crip. Through ontological study and utilizing natural, salvaged, biodegradable, edible, print media and digital mediums, her psychedelic works invite the viewer into facets of biopharmaceutical investigations and educational community practice.

Recent exhibitions include Kings Leap, NYC, Unit 17, Vancouver, Canada, G44 Center for Contemporary Photography, Toronto, Canada, New Image Art Gallery Los Angeles, CA, and Flux Factory, New York, NY. Recent publications include Injustice in Biopharm, 2019, Cassandra Press and Rental Bod, 2016, Peace Library Publications.

Portrait of Sharona Franklin

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