Erik Frydenborg: Distants by The Distants

"DISTANTS" by THE DISTANTS presents an anomalous terrain of shaped pedestals, cast plastic sculptures and digital prints adapted from the pages of used books. Employing both physical and digital processes, Erik Frydenborg reconfigures elements of concrete data, integrating the results into lyrically edited tableaux. His assemblages oscillate between abstraction and objectivity, with extracted components of found objects and images combined in new ways, and with modified material properties.

Frydenborg’s sculptures and print works engage traditional art-making modes—object/base relationships, mold making, still life and landscape imagery. Attempts to interpret Frydenborg’s work using purely formal or art historical criteria quickly unravel, however, confounded by a heightened sense of the analytic or clinical processes at play in his pieces. Although the objects suggest the employment of a didactic syntax, Frydenborg's practice mirrors the specificity of scientific classification without its direction; an investigation that embodies the uncanny and an enigmatic ambivalence of purpose.

Chosen primarily for their functional geometry, the simple pedestals featured here are in fact physical enlargements of atomized representational particles, culled from Frydenborg's database of printed diagrams and educational aids. These structures in turn serve as the foundation for a sequence of variations on a single cast object: in this case, a biomorphic index restated amidst traces of ambiguous apparatus. Frydenborg’s photo-based prints, described by the artist as captures, relate closely to his other primary studio processes of collage and mold-making. Frydenborg’s captures are reconstituted from dissected images of primordial seascapes, vintage pin-up pages, and other illustrated models. All contribute to the sense of a charged but indefinite environment, evoking various atmospheric suggestions of operating theater, museological display, and musical stagecraft.

Erik Frydenborg received his BFA from the Maryland Art Institute and his MFA from the University of Southern California. His work has been reviewed in such publications as Artforum, Artweek and the Los Angeles Times.  Frydenborg’s work recently appeared in Bellows and Whispers at Cherry and Martin (Los Angeles); Post-Rose at Galerie Christian Nagel (Berlin); and will be the subject of an upcoming solo exhibition at the Suburban (Chicago) in 2011. Frydenborg lives and works in Los Angeles.