Rachel Frank: Wild Dreams

SARAHCROWN is pleased to present Wild Dreams, Rachel Frank’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Bringing together a new body of sculpture alongside new works on paper, the exhibition continues Frank’s longstanding exploration of the relationships between non-human species and the ways these interdependencies can contribute to the protection, healing, and repair of damaged ecosystems. Drawing from processes of re-wilding, migration, adaptation, and interspecies exchange, Frank imagines nature not as a collection of discrete organisms, but as a shifting network in which survival depends upon connection.

At the center of Wild Dreams is the question of what it means to hold together in states of vulnerability and change. Frank’s hybrid organisms appear wounded yet generative, awkward yet seductive, unruly yet carefully constructed. Their strangeness proposes nature not as an idealized realm separate from human experience, but as an intricate field of exchanges and dependencies in which humans, too, are implicated. Healing, in this context, does not mean returning to an earlier or untouched condition, but finding ways to adapt, transform, and persist.

This idea is embedded in the physical construction of the sculptures. Frank’s practice has evolved toward increasingly complex combinations of ceramic and glass—materials themselves transformed through heat, melting, liquefaction, and solidification. Ordinary plastic zip ties bind these disparate elements together, taking on an unexpectedly bodily presence that can evoke sutures, connective tissue, tendons, or improvised structures of repair. The gesture of holding together thus becomes at once structural and metaphorical, extending from the individual body to relationships between species and, more broadly, to ecosystems under increasing pressure.

For Frank, these questions have also acquired an unexpectedly intimate dimension. The development of this body of work coincided with a cancer diagnosis, bringing the vulnerability and regenerative capacities of the body into sharper focus. Without becoming explicitly autobiographical, the sculptures carry an intensified awareness of the body as both resilient and precarious—an interconnected system continually engaged in processes of adjustment, repair, and survival.

The exhibition’s new works on paper extend these ideas into a different visual language. Combining cyanotype and watercolor, Frank brings together the photographic trace ofone process with the fluidity of another. Luminous blue fields are infiltrated by branching gestures of pink, orange, and red, allowing one medium to disrupt and transform the other. Occupying an ambiguous territory between photography, drawing, botanical illustration, and abstraction, these works echo the sculptures’ porous relationships between organism and environment. Across both bodies of work, individual forms become part of larger networks, suggesting that survival—and perhaps healing itself—is less an individual act than a condition of connection.

In Wild Dreams, these entanglements open onto a speculative ecology, one in which bodies and species exceed familiar boundaries and new forms of coexistence can be imagined.