Art in all axes: The brilliance of multiply by Frances Sharples

Frances Sharples’s multiply: a queer multimedia chapbook turned art gallery, was displayed in the Multicultural Center for this year’s G.R.E.A.T Day. Sharples’s chapbook aimed to bring the idea of ‘queerness’ and all its connotation, not only to the poems contained within it but also to the fluidity of the art medium throughout. 

In their preface to the rest of the walkthrough, Sharples notes that “Because queerness is such an expansive and boundless abstraction, it is one that is typically expressed unconventionally…In my own iteration of these theories, I decided to exacerbate that [the lack of a] standard by incorporating multimedia elements, from collage to finger-painting.”

Sharples’s stated the goal was to represent queerness through the form and “no-holds-barred” attitude they wished to inhabit. The intention in the detailing, such as the gallery being displayed on easels, shows the care and deliberation put into this exploration, which on the surface seems to be one of free-spiritedness.

Within that dichotomous relationship lies the spirit of queerness desired by the artist. To put it simply, this collection embodies queerness in its refusal of simple binaries and shame coupled with this unrelenting vulnerability and force of self. 

The starting poem-visual coupling is brilliant in referencing the art that has come before in their poem “Portrait of Fritza Riedler by Gustav Klimt.” Not only does this poem get its title from a piece of historical art, but also one in which the painter is notable for their depictions of sensuality in their work, a mood I feel is captured by the writings of Frances themself. This poem is then paired with a painting done by a practicing painter, strengthening that throughline from the boundary-pushing artists of the past whose works encapsulated the tones, intentionalities, and layers of Sharples’s desires (and succeeded in) emulating. 

The opening display, then, serves as a homage of sorts, adding this ethos to the chapbook through the tenderness and admiration the observer can feel from the artist for queer art in all its defined undefinedness. 

The piece which succeeds in this passion-pouring opener inhabits all the child-like spirit of the arts in general, then complicated by the knowledge of adultness. In “fingerpainting,” the audience gets the first demonstration of Sharples’s incorporation of self-made visual art, and this dissection of familial dynamics through memorialization, using the idea of self-portraits/photos to create this conflict between the speaker and their mother. 

Through this exploration, Sharples seems to toy with creating a working definition of self-love and family through prioritization and recognition within the context of queerness. So often, these avenues must be examined and redefined by the self repeatedly to achieve that true sense of identity in a space like queerness, which lives outside of conventional notions of identity. 

These themes of queerness, identity, nonconformity, self-love, found family, connections to ideas of gender, etc., are frequently turned over as the gallery continues.​​ The reader is immersed in this artistic experience which seems to fear “nothing but fear itself” in its shift in visual mediums from paintings to collages to small figurines. It is a display so affectionately aware of its origin and how these origins allow for the diagram of art to be stretched along the x, y, z, and 17 axes.