James Franco and Kalup Linzy. Courtesy of the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery.

Since General Hospital brought the two together in 2010, James Franco and Kalup Linzy’s collaborative work has been rooted in a shared sense of camp, performance, and a fusion of art and show business. However, as is clear in James Franco & Kalup Linzy: Collaborations at Fort Myers’s Bob Rauschenberg Gallery, on view through June 3, Franco and Linzy arrive at and move beyond their collaborative work in tellingly different ways.

The exhibition is structured, physically and thematically, around Ozara and Katessa (2017), a new ten-part video installed in a structure resembling a TV production set. A wooden cube built for the series fills nearly a quarter of the large gallery. The structure’s impromptu character adds to the artifice. At the center of the series are its namesake characters: Ozara (Franco), a theatre director with aspirations to “cross over” into film by way of her latest project, and Katessa (Linzy), an actress dedicated to her craft, and the star of Ozara’s new project. Like many of Franco and Linzy’s past collaborations, Ozara and Katessa draws heavily on the narrative conventions and melodramatic stylings of soap operas set against dialogue voicing that is digitally altered and overdubbed.

Throughout, Franco overacts, genuinely enjoying the pantomime and lip syncing. He is abidingly self-aware and folds contemporary art into light entertainment so thoroughly that it’s disorienting. Linzy is comparatively subdued. In contrast to Franco reveling in farce, Linzy digs into something much more personal. For example, another video in the exhibition, Linzy’s First Soap Opera (1994), deploys a typical soap opera story arc to detail the deterioration of the ozone layer, in a video replete with emotional havoc and histrionic dialogue and music. Notably, this piece was originally a high school science homework assignment. While many of his peers may have doodled in diaries and sketchbooks, a then-teenage Linzy utilized soap operas as a mode of personal expression—a deep well from which he still draws. Although Collaborations features a partnership, it is Linzy’s emotional heavy lifting—earnest in its campiness—that gives strength to the exhibition.

James Franco & Kalup Linzy: Collaboration will be on view through June 3, 2017.

Danny Olda is a freelance art critic and editor. He currently lives and works on the west coast of Florida.

Folkestone is one of those seaside towns that is both idyllic and sleepy – the kind of place you run away from London to in order to escape the chaos and urban imprisonment. With the coast of France visible on a clear day, it is becoming a place of refuge for many of the artistic community who eagerly embrace the one hour commute to London for a bit of serene escapism. But this somnolent town is stirring – the Folkestone Triennial is reinvigorating the town with a perceptive, engaging and meaningful project – an ambitious public programme aspiring to reach far beyond geographical boundaries.

Curated by Andrea Schlieker, the Folkestone Triennial, unlike many overshadowed peripheral exhibitions, attracts internationally renowned artists who respond in a perceptive way to the unique geographic and demographic qualities of the area. With permanent works and temporary installations, the Folkestone Triennial animates the town, engaging with both the fleeting international audience passing through and the permanent local community.

Tracey Emin, 'Jacket' from 'Baby Things,' 2008. Photo © Thierry Bal.

The inaugural Triennial in 2008 brought together 22 works by significant artists, including Christian Boltanski’s sound installation of letters of First World War servicemen being read as one sat upon a bench at the site where these men were shipped off to battle, staring out into the sea, and Tracey Emin’s work ‘Baby Things’ – a spattering of bronze-cast baby clothes strewn across the city paying homage to the vast number of teenage mothers that inhabit these seaside towns such as Folkestone, and Margate, Emin’s notorious hometown. With the permanence of many of these works, including Emin’s infantile clothing collection, an alfresco accumulation of works many institutions would dream is being built.

The Folkestone Triennial, now in its second edition, has expanded beyond the regional specificity of its first incarnation to wider international interests. Looking beyond it’s shores, ‘A Million Miles From Home’ explores migration, borders, displacement and transnational identity. These themes extend across a post-globalised world, yet remain particularly pertinent to this place – a seaside town which exists on the periphery between nations, within Britain, a country with a diverse, multicultural reality.

AK Dolven, 'Out of Tune,' 2011. Photograph: Thierry Bal.

Amongst the 19 newly commissioned works is Norwegian-born artist, A K Dolven’s ‘Out of Tune’ – a reclaimed sixteenth-century church bell that had been decommissioned for having an impure tone – it lacked the conformity and clarity required by the institution. Standing high above the horizon on the beach, the lone bell invites the viewer to ring it, crying out over the town and across the sea. The bell has been freed from the constraints of a tower and given a new home, however it remains isolated and forced to stand on its own – a poetic metaphor for the reality of migration, as displaced individuals forever negotiate geographical and cultural differences.

CAMP ‘The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories,’ 2011. Film Still Copyright of the Artists. Photograph Thierry Bal.

The inspiration for Bombay-based collective CAMP’s video work is the HG Wells title ‘The Country of the Blind and Other Stories’ questioning if, in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man can indeed be king. Asking local volunteers at the National Coastwatch Institution to film the sea with a telescope, CAMP enacts the politics of the panopticon gaze and procedures of control. Looking outwards from the ivory tower, fishing boats, ships and sailboats were recorded by individuals acting as part of an omnipotent power. With the fluidity of the sea containing the border where two nations meet here, it is the one-eyed telescopic gaze looking out to the horizon that maintains the pretence of power and control.

Hew Locke, 'For Those in Peril On The Sea,' 2001. Photograph Thierry Bal.

While the gaze controls the borders at sea, the boat represents the possibility of transgression. Hew Locke’s work ‘For Those in Peril on the Sea’ consists of nearly 100 model ships installed in the oldest church in Folkstone, which were collected from around the world, as well as fabricated in Locke’s studio from his trademark cheap, colourful plastic materials. The boat here stands as a symbol of migration, transnational locality and heterotopias – it represents the possibility for escape and the dissolution of borders in international waters. However, with over-saturated media images and stories of tsunamis, pirates and oil spills ever-present, attention has also be drawn to the vulnerabilities and dangers of this non-place. The ship may represent autonomy but it is also the space susceptible to the perils of the sea.

Overlooking the town is Nathan Coley’s illuminated sign reading ‘Heaven Is A Place Where Nothing Ever Happens’ – and while this seaside town may be a place of respite from the chaos of urban centres, and heaven to some, it is no longer that place where nothing happens. The Triennial is developing a formidable platform for contemporary art that engages with international concerns while remaining connected to local geography, history and culture – by no means an easy feat. I applaud you – and I personally thank you for giving me a excuse to dip my feet in the salty sea and get a bit of fresh air in my lungs.

Nathan Coley, 'Heaven is a Place Where Nothing Ever Happens,' 2008. Image courtesy of the Artist, Folkestone Triennial and Creative Foundation. Photo © Thierry Bal.