Spoiler alert: If you have not read Clarice Lispector’s ontological novel The Passion According to G.H., you might want to skip this paragraph. In the book, G.H. eats a cockroach. Before she does it, she spends hours teeming with both desire and aversion. As soon as she eats it, she wants to understand what happened to her, but she knows that to do so she has to put it into language-to give it a form. The novel becomes the search for that language. “Creation isn’t imagination,” she writes, “it’s running the huge risk of coming face to face with reality. Understanding is a creation, it’s my only way. I shall have to painstakingly translate telegraph signals-translate the unknown into a language that I don’t know.”

Evidence of the Material World features sculptures, mixed media works and artist’s books; each project reflects Frid’s inventive integration of diverse material processes. For this exhibition, the pieces differ from each other in format, scale, media and execution, yet as a group they behave like distinct planets that orbit around a shared premise-each piece is triggered by a textual event that Frid has distilled, processed, and translated into a material manifestation.

The trigger-texts, as Frid calls them, are fragments from sources as commonplace as a dictionary definition or as intricate as an epic poem. In each work the trigger-text becomes an occasion to ponder how language both describes and obscures phenomena both intimate and impersonal: death, love and being; time, space and light. Whether a little or a lot of the trigger-text remains, in every instance the source language is no more than a splinter in the naming of the works. The works are at once gestures and descriptions of time (process) and of fact (the material evidence of that process and of the things it transforms).

Raised in Mexico City and Vancouver, Dianna Frid currently lives in Chicago. Her work builds on a longstanding concern with architecture and with re-imagining literary and scientific representations of natural phenomena. For several years Frid has been making and exhibiting books, objects, and installations that join mixed media, sculpture, and works on paper. Her work has been shown in galleries in the USA and abroad and at numerous public venues including PS1-MOMA (NY), The Drawing Center (NY), The Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) and the Neues Kunstforum (Cologne). Frid is Assistant Professor in Studio Arts in the College of Architecture and the Arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has received grants from The Canada Council for the Arts and a Chicago Artadia Award. Recently she was a resident at in John Hejduk’s Wall House 2 Foundation in Groningen, where she will be creating a site-specific project for 2013.

Also featured in the exhibition is a recent edition project by Dianna Frid called On the Modification of Clouds (After L.H.). This suite of four lithographs was beautifully printed by Bud Shark and published by Shark’s Ink in Boulder.

On Saturday October 22 at 1:00 pm join us in the gallery for a conversation about the exhibition between Dianna Frid and Julie Rodrigues-Widlholm, the Pamela Alper Associate Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

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Tags: Andreas Karl Schulze, devening projects + editions, Diana Frid