Artist’s Statement 

Five years ago, along the eastern shore of a modest pothole lake, not far from the Minnesota River headwaters in Big Stone County, a weary congregation of cottonwoods, a few arthritic box elders, and one snarled snag of sun-bleached cedar found themselves swallowed up by rising waters. Successive years of heavy precipitation had filled their basin past its brim, and by the next summer, 2019, the trees were all swamped and dead. Through seasons of wind and rain, shifting ice and erosive decay, I sought to memorialize the sculpted personalities that began to emerge from the remnants of those once-great trees. From driftwood snags dancing the tango to lakeside reflections reminiscent of Japanese marbling, these Abstract Elementals range from starkly minimalist “stump portraits” to psychedelic renderings of entropy in motion—framed as dreamlike snapshots of equilibrium in decline, of atoms liberated from their rigid, individual containment—then cycled back into the watery continuum of eternal recurrence.  

Bio 

Jason Frank is a photographic artist and naturalist based in Ortonville, Minnesota. His work is deeply influenced by Taoist philosophy and Jungian analysis of mythic imagery, focusing less on explicit documentation of his subjects and more on the poetic impact of landscapes translated through the subtle corridors of the subconscious mind.