Born in 1975 in Palm Springs (California), Frank Selby lives and works in North Carolina. Drawing from press photography, film stills, and mental images, Frank Selby's work explores the indexical mark as a sign of absence. The artist's detailed, horrific renderings of land and cityscapes, populated with dead bodies, invariably refer to past conflicts while deliberately avoiding their representation. The trauma of conflict, the artist seems to imply, exists outside of the space of the picture: as that which cannot be represented. Within these limits, Selby's buildings and bodies come to function as traces of the calamity that befell them, as much as they are also traces of their former selves. "Uncovering a sense of presence through an implied absence, these drawings and paintings explore a peculiar, discontinuous narrative. Selby’s images largely depict the aftermath of and moments encircling—not the actual battles— the Civil War. While this choice reflects Selby’s interest in absence, it is also dependent on the available historical sources that in contradistinction to modern war photography have little record of battle scenes. In compensation for this lack of documentation, photographers often found solutions in dragging bodies across battlefields, composing and constructing images. In the drawings of text, Selby’s process is one of subtraction, removing words and image from pages in his final renderings. (…) Although the polyester resembles vellum, it is important to note that these are not tracings, even in the drawings composed of simply text. Not only does the polyester’s opacity not allow it, close inspection of the drawings reveals minute errors in copy and translation from the original photographic and textual sources." - Greg Lindquist