Francie Bishop Good manipulates ordinary objects and spaces. She examines how contemporary women assign significance and emotion in an age beyond that of Valerie Solanas, when establishing recognition and power as a feminist, female, or effeminate artist entailed simply and singularly shooting Andy Warhol. Good reminds the viewer that to be a woman-- and more importantly, to be human-- means an acquisition of varying degrees of passivity and chaos, comeliness and wretchedness, creativity and dysfunction, youth and maturity, femininity and masculinity.

David Castillo

October 2008

Continuing Adventures of Our Heroine

Carly, So Far is a retrospective glimpse of Francie Bishop Good’s on-going photographic project documenting the development of her neice since age seven.  This exhibition features a sampling of works from numerous series depicting Carly drawn from more than one hundred photographs.  Extending from childhood through adolescence, these images are a prolonged meditation on the relationship of a young girl to a rapid evolving contemporary society.

Curated by George Kinghorn, Deputy Director & Chief Curator

Museum of Contemporary Art | Jacksonville  2007

Francie Bishop Good has documented her niece, Carly, for more than nine years.  her ongoing project is a prolonged meditation on the relationship between a young girl and our culture at large.  Frequently alooming, out-of-focus figure on the periphery of an unsettling mise en scene, Carly is the surrogate for the artists, the viewer, the universal consciousness -- a girl/woman forming her sense of identity in a chaotic world.

Caren Golden, 2006

Photo Femmes, Caren Golden Fine Art

For artist Francie Bishop Good, creating art has never been about media distinctions.  She has found it unnecessary to choose between painting and photography when she can do both simultaneously.  Her most recent series, Carly TV, embodies this desire for cross media pollination and finds as its vehicle, the computer.  Through digital manipulation, Bishop Good is empowered with the tools to juxtapose painting and photography for a result that is complex and, at times, unsettling.

 
Bishop Good acknowledges the fact that the television is a “visually and psychologically loaded object.”  By manipulating its presence within an image, it can become a surreal device, an object of terror, a mirror of popular culture, or a reminder of our existence.  These carious characteristics are heightened on Carly TV due to the limited number of images and subjects.

Ginger Gregg Duggan

Curator

Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale

Essay part of publication for Project Series by Museum of Art | Fort Lauderdale