Illusion: Now, Mind and World
New Works by Inga Frick
CURATOR'S STATEMENT

Some works of art are meant merely to been seen, while others give the viewer a more multi-faceted experience. Inga Frick accomplishes the latter in no uncertain terms. It is impossible to view these hybrid works without responding to them in a visceral, physical, almost guttural way. There’s food for thought to be found too of course, as well as a veritable feast for the eyes, but it’s the memory of the perceptual disorientation and the state of mind the work engenders that stays, well after the images themselves have faded from the mind’s eye.

Inga Frick’s work is composed of elements that reflect the journey she has taken to bring her to this point in her creative life. Beginning her career as a painter, she later turned to video and digital images as her primary form of expression. In recent years she has swung around again towards object-making, this time naturally combining painting with collage, assemblage, digital images and photography. The works she now composes move back and forth between all of these processes in a manner that, if not exactly easy, is certainly hard-won and unusually effective. It is somewhere in the swirling space created as she motors from one medium to another that Frick also defines and begins to explore the content of the work.

Frick’s approach is still that of a painter, though there is little actual paint to be found in the competed pieces. Building her images in layers, adding on and then effectively erasing by taking away, photographing what she has done, and then distorting the photographic image in a myriad of ways, Frick wrestles with the formal elements of composition, color, line, movement and depth of space. At the same time she is moving in and out of abstraction, back and forth between what is real, a facsimile of what is real and complete fabrication. Sometimes she includes pieces from the world- bits of string, feathers, fabric, even a shoe. Other times she presents us with photographs of the lively portraits of time and space she has created, frozen testaments to one brief instant, one fleeting version, one creative incarnation. Always her images are beyond rich and lively, over the top in their baroque inclusiveness, chock-full of everything and nothing at the same time. Bringing to mind Peter Paul Rubens, with his darkly vibrant and overactive compositions full of fleshy folds and draping fabric, Frick has learned her lessons from the masters, digested the aesthetic and techniques of the past, and has now moved on to a format synonymous with the present.

On the most basic level, experiencing and entering into one Frick’s works can tell us something about the difference between reality and illusion, between what is real and what isn’t really real. For all the lushness and exuberance, the fecund excessiveness, the forbidding beauty, there is also something disquieting. Like a fly by the ear, the work transmits a low level disturbance, a sense of spatial confusion. Frick makes you shake your head, blink your eyes, buy new glasses. Yet at the same time, and most especially in her newest pieces, Frick is also concerned with depicting thought. She likens the work to the process of meditation, an apt and illuminating metaphor. Frick is on to something here. Like the drifting mind, the spaces she creates manage to encompass clarity and obscurity, awareness and blissful oblivion. It’s enough to make you question, just a bit, both the nature of perception and the nature of thought itself. It’s enough to make you wonder.

Nancy Sausser
Exhibitions Director
McLean Project for the Arts