SELECTED PUBLICATIONS AND REVIEWS
2004
Michael
Klant, Grundkurs Kunst 4: Aktion, Kinetik, Neue Medien,
Braunschweig: Schroedel, 2004, pp. 152-153 (textbook).
This
scholarly German text places contempary new media art practice in a historical
context. My collaborative work with Inga McCaslin Frick is discussed together with work by Marina Abromovic, Vito Acconci,
Carl Andre, Joseph Beuys, Jonathan Borofsky, Alexander Calder, Christo,
Peter Fischli, Masaki Fujihata, Karl Otto Gotz, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer,
Rebecca Horn, William Kentridge, Yves Klein, Richard Long,Christian Marclay,
Gordon Matta-Clark, Mark Napier, Bruce Nauman, Shirin Neshat, Nam June
Paik, Pablo Picasso, Otto Piene, Jackson Pollock, Pipilotti Rist, Bill
Seaman, Jean Tinguely, Bill Viola, Peter Weibel and others.
Claire
Wolf Krantz: "The Best of Visual Art in 2003," Chicago Artists' News, January, 2004
Still from Unstill Then,
Video Installation, 2001,
Inga McCaslin Frick
"My
Choice for best Chicago exhibit was Gillian Brown and Inga McCaslin
Frick's video installations at I Space gallery of the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 230 W. Superior, 2nd Floor, Chicago. Here,
Brown's videos interacted with sculptural objects, while Frick incorporated
a reading of Merleau Ponty with her video of swimmers.
Although the artists conceived their works separately, they shared visual
materials, (i.e. appropriated and original film footage), technological equipment
and ideas as they jointly explored perception in relation to processes of thought
and imagination."
2003
Claire
Wolf Krantz: review, Art in America, October, p. 142.
Insight
Out, Video Installation,
2000, Gillian Brown
Gillian
Brown and Inga McCaslin Frick at I Space
"Gillian Brown and Inga McCaslin Frick have shown together in the past,
and they paired up again for this two-person exhibition of video installations
at the University of Illinois's
I Space. In separately conceived works, both artists explore perception as
it relates to our thought processes and imagination. While Brown's videos
interact with sculptural objects, Frick incorporates sound with projected images. For
a work titled Insight Out (eye diagram), Brown constructed a three-dimensional multipart model diagramming sight. A small video camera
projects, onto a sandblasted portion of a large glass globe, an image
of the artist writing the number one on a blackboard. The projection is then refracted through a lens, mimicking real vision, as
it is refocused upside down onto a large cutout Plexiglas hand, the fingers
pointing skyward. There is a small inverted wire hand suspended within the
globe connectid to the large hand with criss-crossing wires that form an "X."
In the video, as Brown makes her marks, the numbers shift and change, fading
into various diagrams and formulas, becoming metaphors for the progressive
history of mathematics.
Frick's Turnaround (Unstill Then) presents a compendium of footage projected on the front and back of two
translucent screens placed 8 feet abart. Her identical by unsynchronized image
sequences are focused both on and through the screens, producing complex interactions
and movements. Everyday scenes (children on playground equipment, newspapers
blowing in the wind) float by, slow down and are overtaken by passing clouds
and flying birds. In various degrees of focus and blur, this play of imagery
is both meditative and discordant, as the accompanying audio is also out of
sync.
Brown's background in conceptual photography and Frick's in physics and painting
have influenced their work as well as the artists' explorations of perceiving
and imagining. Their careful consideration of space, combined with an attention
to movement, enhance the beauty and complexity of these projects."
Fred Camper: GILLIAN BROWN at I Space, Chicago Reader , February 28, 2003
Insight
Out, Video Installation,
2000, Gillian Brown
Gillian Brown projects video onto three-dimensional objects, some of which are transparent so that the imagery is also seen behind them; her free-floating illusions definitely undercut the idea of picture as truth. Born in New Hampshire in 1951 and now living in Fairfield, Iowa, she began questioning representation and perception by painting imagery from photographs on three-dimensional installations--putting pictures of family members, for example, on a staircase like one in her childhood home. Then she became friends with painter Inga McCaslin Frick: "We were both interested in exploring perceptual issues and thinking about how we think," Brown says. Frick moved into video, and Brown collaborated with her before making her own video sculptures, four of which are on view at I Space (along with a solo work of Frick's and a colloboration with her).
Brown's fragile magic recalls the charm of lantern shows, stereoscopic slides, and shadow puppetry, configuring images as conjurer's tricks. And the way she includes lenses makes optics and eyesight explicit subjects. In an untitled work, images are projected on two glovelike hands hanging in a birdcage as well as on a cloth screen at the back of it. Projected on the left hand are two hands that appear to build a house of cards while a card house on the right keeps falling down. At another point a magician releasing a bird is projected on one hand, then it flies from one hand to the other. A lens at the back of the cage focuses on the screen a video image of skaters and divers--Brown calls them "people who broke loose." Creating tension between opposites, the piece juxtaposes freedom and entrapment, construction and destruction.
The relationship between what we see and what we know is the subject of Insight Out, inspired by a diagram of human sight in an essay by Rene Descartes. The sculptural element consists of wires extending from the outline of a hand, then crossing and ending at an upside-down image on the retina. On the rear of the bulb, sandblasted so that it will hold an image, Brown projects a video of herself writing on a blackboard. Her marks are simple vertical strokes, as if she were counting, but occasionally more complex chalk drawing appear: cuneiform signs, a diagram of the Pythagorean theorem. Language and mathematics seem at once invocations of the world and arbitrary games of mark making; by encasing her blackboard imagery within a model of the eye, Brown underlines the dependence of knowledge on subjective human perception.
Copyright (c) Fred Camper 2003
Additional articles by Fred Camper and others can be purchased from the Chicago Reader Archives
Mouthtomouth
magazine: lipservice, Spring
2003 issue, p. 142.
Still
from Unstill,
Video Installation, 2001,
Inga McCaslin Frick
Gillian
Brown and Inga McCaslin Frick:
Each/Other Vanishing Point, I Space
"Words will never do justice to the sheer visual poetry of this show.
Suffice it to say, this was what you wish your dreams looked like:
flickering superimpositions of moving images culled from lifetimes of memory,
multiply projected on transparent scrims, glass lenses, and/or small sculptural
forms molded from cheesecloth, casting magic lantern shows of longing, desire,
and nostalgia on darkened gallery walls. Side by side, these artists acknowledged
their kinship in fashioning densely layered, technically intricate, and unresolved
narratives. Their room-sized audio visual collaboration, Each/Other,
was the eloquent exception: an ocean swimmer -- accompanied by recitations
from Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible -- approached her
double reflection to achieve an apotheosis of confluence, a fleeting moment
of transcendence in the struggle for integration of the authentic and projected
selves. This was a rare exhibition: one we could look at forever."
Visit mouthtomouth
magazine online
2000
Temin,
Christine: "Assorted Artists Capture Rapture,"
The Boston Globe,February 2, 2000.
Each/Other,
Video Installation, 1998
A collaboration between
Inga McCaslin Frick and Gillian Brown
"Among
the other notably strong water inspired pieces in the show are Pat Steir's
familiar drenched-looking canvases, the action of the paint cascading downward;
Kiki Smith's long horizontal "Tidal," prints of a repeating moon
suggesting its various phases, all hanging over a crinkled-paper sea; and
Gillian Brown and Inge McCaslin Frick's video installation "Each/Other."
This last is a fragment of historic black-and-white footage of a woman swimming
the English Channel, simultaneously projected on two surfaces that angle outward
like a book. The swimmer eventually meets herself in the middle, in a sensual
Rorschach that then dissolves. It's astonising that the creators of such voluptuousness
have also contributed the most repulsive work in the show. Upstairs in hell,
where it belongs, is the Brown/Frick, "Untitled (cockroaches),"
a video in which the bugs seem to consume a wall, itself a stand-in for skin,
meant as impermeable yet being eaten away."
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