N y s s a F r a n k
Contact Nyssa for more information about her artwork or performances, and for all purchasing information
My name is Nyssa which means a seemingly paradoxical ideal: both the beginning and the end, the means and ends in one. Perhaps inspired by my name, I embark on a life outside of “or” and dive into a world of “and,” a world without polarizing dichotomies. I am happy and sad, good and bad, beautiful and ugly. I continue to search and create a language, both syntactically and visually, that enables deep communication within myself and with others, where one unearths meaning and thoughts instead of limiting them with pre-made finite definitions.
Through my art I explore time within time, non-linear and non-binary identities, negative and positive space weaving within itself. The world is in a perpetual state of motion, so how can one thing.
I do not like talking about my art a lot, I’m good at making up meaning which confuses me. Most of the time meaning feels applied, longed for by hungry viewers who have been trained to try to “make sense” of the abstract. When one sees a Picasso painting most people immediately try to put it back together, they find objects, “oh there is a chair, or a face.” Perhaps this is due to language, for that which has no name doesn’t exist? What is a chair called that cannot be sat in? However, why would Picasso dismantle and dismember “reality” for you to simply put it back together? Does an object change when meaning is applied to it via language, does its “function” change, or, is it our prospective that changes? If a chair was called a table, and you sat on it, would you be sitting on a table? These thoughts are exercises of the mind, they do not need to be answered, just as Picassos paintings do not need to be “put back together.”
In the end, or in the beginning, or in the ending beginning or beginning end, my artwork is a non-linear process. I am not working towards something, rather within something. Creating allows me to “not think,” to not think with words. Strangely, even my poetry seems to allow that. Perhaps then, I mean not without words, but without confined meaning, pre-established definitions.
My art, and life, are in a perpetual state of possibilities, embracing the unknown, the unspoken. It is hard work, it is work to wade in uncertainty, to create my own idea of a “successful life.” It is work not to apply meaning, to be patient and see if it surfaces on its own, and if it doesn't, to embrace that. However, to me this is the only mental work that is important, by working on this we begin to see each human as an individual, each day and moment as an eternity. We stop judgement, we stop categorizing people and days and events, we embrace this abstract world, for that is what it is an abstract world!!
