Nebula Winners

ANDREW RAFACZ continues 2015 with Nebula Winners, a solo exhibition of new sculptural works by Erik Frydenborg. The exhibition continues through Saturday, June 13, 2015.

Nebulous winters. Nuclear options. Dictionaries stuffed with ugly alphabets. Erik Frydenborg has just one hundred years to forget them all.

Beneath incorporated skies, soul deserts littered with reminders of reminders. Collected buildings, space and spaces, stitched together roads of gibberish. Undigitized content peppering horizons. Everything in time and place, but none of it in here or now.

In a clean salon, metal sentinels guard black boxes. Weightless tomes betray solid states. As hours turn to seconds, Frydenborg must unlock their sense records, before the nearest star flames out.

Pause galactic sunrise for a sponsor’s message: Words. Keep Living Clear. The rest has been removed for want of time, loose pages that once kept pace have now congealed.

In an installation of new hybrid objects, Frydenborg combines cast, painted aluminum sculptures with a series of silkscreened freestanding panels, loosely approximating the visual syntax of science fiction paperbacks.

Collapsing sculptural and graphic space in an obstinate amalgam, Frydenborg’s works engage a complication of deep and shallow dimensionality. With symmetrically framed totemic figures set against simple geometric landscapes, Frydenborg’s works evoke the frontal staging common to museum dioramas and window display. And while their halftone-printed complexions root them in the intimate viewing distance between the eye and the page, the sculptures also wear the dithered resolution of exterior statuary, suggestive markers of some unknown roadside attraction.

In Gallery Two, Frydenborg presents collages from his Full Color Bachelor series (2013-present). These small works on paper are composed from reclaimed educational illustrations: maquette-like images built from extracts of disparate drawings, recombined in contiguous, mechanically figural assemblies. Close inspection reveals these renderings to be the source of origin for the arcane structures in the adjacent gallery.