Goldfinch is pleased to present The Registers, a two-person exhibition of works by Dianna Frid (Chicago, IL) and Monika Müller (Lucerne, Switzerland). The exhibition opens Sunday April 8th with a reception from 3-6pm, and will be on view through Saturday May 19th. An artists' talk with both Frid and Müller will take place at the gallery on Saturday, April 14 at 2pm. Additional programs may be announced at a later date. A second iteration of this exhibition titled All Days Combined will travel to the Alpineum Produzentengalerie in October of 2018.
The Registers aligns Frid and Müller's mutually sympathetic, yet formally quite different, ways of looking at, sifting through, and evincing aspects of the material world around them. Artistic mediums and materials both artists share include graphite, paper, and drawing, along with their incorporation of images or texts derived from newspapers and other sources. The series of graphite, pastel and colored pencil drawings from Monika Müller's [the] World [as an ordered Whole] III began in 2016, while Müller was in residence in Chicago as an awardee of the Chicago Luzern Sister Cities Studio program. During her four-month stay, Müller read and collected newspapers on a daily basis. After Müller returned to Lucerne, Frid continued to send her photographs from the New York Times. From those, Müller chose images that registered with her, and used them as jumping off points for dreamlike landscapes that suggest the precarious relations between human beings and the environment, while also, perhaps, evoking the sense of helplessness and awe we all face whenever we are asked to confront our collective state of global instability. The Registers will include a number of drawings from [the] World [as an ordered Whole] III, along with a new wall drawing executed by the artist on site.
Dianna Frid has also used photographs as material, most recently in her Apuntes and Acroliths series, selections from which will be exhibited in The Registers along with recent sculptures and a new artist's book. The works in Apuntes (the Spanish word for 'notations') and Acroliths (a sculpted figure whose head, hands, and feet are made of stone, while the torso is made of wood or other material) consist of Frid's photographs depicting the carved hair and garment folds in classical Greek and Roman marble sculpture, which Frid transfers to fabric and then "annotates" with embroidered diagrams from weaving manuals-in particular, the textile diagrams in Anni Albers' groundbreaking book On Weaving. These source images are first acquired through Frid's process of looking at classical sculpture exhibits in search of examples of carved hair and cloth that resonate with her-a process that is in many ways akin to Muller's method of browsing through newspapers to find images that register with her. Frid takes numerous photographs of these sculptures and sculptural parts, which she later selects, edits, and interweaves into mixed media pieces. The sublimely strange works that result from this juxtaposition and layering of images, signs, texts, and textile weavings are, ultimately, the artist's way of registering the boundlessly complex nature of textuality itself.
Artists Bios:
Dianna Frid is an artist working at the intersection of text and textile. Her sculptures, installations, artist's books and mixed-media works have been shown nationally and internationally. Articles and reviews on her work have appeared in publications including Bomb, Art Forum, Art in America, the Chicago Tribune,New City, Neue Luzerner Zeitung, Hyperallergic, Letras Libres, and Sculpture. Frid was born in Mexico City where she lived as a child until her family immigrated to Canada. She currently lives in Chicago and is an Associate Professor in the Art Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her website is www.diannafrid.net.
Monika Müller was born in Lucerne Switzerland in 1969. She studied Art and Design at the University of Utah at the Department of Art and Architecture and at the Lucerne University of applied Sciences and Art, Department of Art and Design where received her BA in 2000. She was Assistant Professor for Design and Art of the ETH Zürich, at the Department of Architecture with Professor Peter Jenny. She is the Co-Founder of the Alpineum Produzentengalerie in Lucerne, Switzerland. Her work has been shown in Switzerland and abroad. She has received numerous grants and residencies such as the Cité des Arts Residency in Paris, the Pfeifer Mobil travelling grant from the Otto Pfeifer Foundation and the Chicago studio residency from the Lucerne sister cities program. Her website is www.monikammueller.ch.
The artists would like to thank the Sister Cities Program Luzern-Chicago, Lucerne, the Embassy of Switzerland in the United States, and the Fuka Fond of the City of Lucerne for their generous support of the exhibition.
