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Horton Gallery is pleased to present Sequences, the New York solo debut of Dallas-based artist Brian Fridge.
Beginning with an interest in painting and sculpture, Brian Fridge's first video works came about in 1994. A typical work is his widely exhibited video Vault Sequence, 1995, a version of which was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial Exhibition. Recorded in the artist’s apartment, the silent, black and white image undergoing transformation seems at moments to have come from a sonogram and at others from the Hubble space telescope.
Fridge's lens-based video works are derived from events and places grounded in a human scale and become multi-scale video images, evoking a variety of associations. Working with readily available materials and indoor lighting, he is interested in the most basic subjects of light, matter, space, and time. The possibilities afforded by video are as he states:
" ... video displaces actual quantities with something more open-ended. Having to consider actual size was uninteresting to me when making objects or environments in my student work. I always came back to just wanting images… images grounded in physics, yet free from physics, and something more like a thought or a dream."
Characterizing the pictorial space of video as a merging of aspects of the medium and of the subject being recorded, Fridge considers what to distill and how to construct, making what will end up as a flat rectangular field of modulating light. As a result, the videos often have a distinct presence as events themselves, existing in the flow of time. Preferring presentation to representation, he forefronts the nature of how things simply are. There is a tone of deadpan resignation in the works.
This dry, observational manner permeates those of his works that have as their source a particular natural phenomena; usually these involve fluids. There is more of an interest in expressing the uncanny and absurd than that of merging of art and science. "... I’d like my work to invite a variety of associations. For example, I like images that have a feel of simultaneous familiarity and unfamiliarity." And there is hardly a sign of anything biological in his video imagery, instead the viewer is the biology, and the video is one part of the viewer's perception.
Brian Fridge (b. 1969, Fort Worth, TX) lives and works in Dallas, TX. Fridge received an MFA from The University of Texas at Dallas and a BFA from University of North Texas. Exhibitions include the 2005 inaugural edition of the Turin Triennial, Turin, IT, 2000 Biennial Exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, and Out of the Ordinary, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX. Awards include the Dallas Museum of Art Kimborough Fund. Residencies include ArtPace, San Antonio, TX, Central Track, University of Texas at Dallas, TX and Ateliers Hoherweg, Dusseldorf, DE.
Brian Fridge Sequences is curated by James Cope.
