Robert Frankle

Description

Toil presents the results of sweat, blood, accumulated dust, and other particles at the end of 3 months of winter exercise on a indoor bicycle. Over the course of time, the sweat has accumulated, dried, and crystallised. It has become something far more substantive than what one usually sees when it glistens on the skin or it runs and drips to the ground. The images become an unrecognisable vision of sweat. Once known that that the images depict sweat, it is curious to observe the different forms that it takes on and its component parts when it solidifies.

The work toys with our expectations. Without knowing that the images show sweat, an observer is unlikely to identify it as such. It is merely a series of abstract, crystallised forms. Sweat, an inevitable result of toil, is usually viewed with distaste. However, in these images, it becomes transformed into something that has its own strange beauty. And why shouldn't sweat and toil, even blood, have a sort of beauty ?