Art in America
October 2003
I Space Gallery

Each/Other: Gillian Brown and Inga McCaslin Frick
by Claire Wolf Krantz

An ongoing collaboration between Gillian Brown and Inga McCaslin Frick informs this 2-person exhibit of video installations. In these separately conceived works, Brown and Frick mutually explore how we perceive in relation to our thought processes and imagination. While Brown's videos interact with sculptural objects, Frick incorporates sound with her images. As in the past, these artists also share visual materials, (i.e. appropriated and original film footage), and technological equipment.

For Insight Out, Brown constructed a 3-dimensional model of an eye and hand, including a translucent glass globe, a lens, and a cutout hand. A wire "drawing" in space diagrams sight, originating at the hand, crisscrossing near the lens, and then separating at the globe (the "eye"). On the back of the globe, Brown projected an image of herself, writing numeral one's on a blackboard. Because of the globe's translucency, the image could be seen on the globe and also was refracted forward through the lens, mimicking real vision, as it was refocused upside down onto a similarly translucent hand. As Brown wrote her marks, the numerical images shifted and changed, fading into various diagrams and formulas, becoming metaphors for the progressive history of mathematics, from the earliest counting on fingers to today's complicated use of numbers.

A translucent dress form in Brown's Untitled (sleeper/dressform) contained footage of a restless sleeper projected onto a tiny bed. Images of flying birds spilled into the interior of the implied "body", glancing off other shapes such as a roof or ceiling, suggesting that sleep and the body are the repositories for dreams, for flights of the imagination that escapes the imprisonment of the flesh.

Frick's video, Turnaround, is a compendium of footage projected from two directions, front and back, facing each other. Her identical but unsynchronized images are focused on and through two translucent screens placed 8" apart, producing complex interactions and movements among the forms. Everyday, mundane images (of children playing on playground equipment, newspapers blowing in the wind) float by, slow down, and are overtaken by moving clouds and birds flying. Moving in different directions, in various degrees of focus and blur, this play of imagery is both meditative and discordant, calling to mind the freedom and indeterminacy of the imagination co-existing with the constrictive world of the mundane. Combinations of sounds sometimes enhance the images and sometimes are disjunctive with them.

Brown's background in conceptual photography and Frick's in physics and painting has influenced their work's conception and appearance in their mutual exploration of thinking, perceiving, and imagining. Their careful and knowledgeable considerations of space and color, and their attention to movement, focus and blur, enhance these projects' sensual beauty and intellectual complexity.

Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist, freelance critic, and guest curator.
As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images.