By appropriating found images and playfully liberating them from their original meaning, Frid creates her own open-ended vocabulary - one could say a vocabulary ridded of adjectives and conjunctions, but only consisting of verbs or nouns. In several works, small pictures taken from first aid manuals are connected by embroidery floss and seem to cause a sort of infinite chain reaction, from one word/image grows another, resulting in a visual conundrum. The otherwise worrisome images themselves (choking victims, pairs of figures engaged in mouth to mouth resuscitation) become quite ambiguous: they could constitute a diagram of intense emotions, a tree of life, a puzzle, an ornamental pattern such as one finds on cloth ...

With Frid's works based on cultivated structures like gardens or museums, one does not only face labyrinthine compositions made out of countless adopted fragments, but one seems to be looking at them from a distorted aerial perspective. Or is it a mirage, as with Inversion, where a beautifully embroidered maze hovers above an abstract landscape? What used to be a system meant to outline taste or knowledge is here transformed into a phantasmal and indecipherable apparition. In contrast to the elusiveness of the images, Frid's fabric montages are physically dense and often multi-layered, which emphasizes a palpable sense of accumulation and also introduces an element of time.

Frid's and Herzog's compositions veer between representation and abstraction, stasis and metamorphosis, the known and the unknown. As beholders, we should feel free to reinvent our own vocabulary to describe what we see (or, for that matter, what's seeing us). In a time when everything seems to already have a name, a place, a purpose, an explanation, Herzog and Frid strive for connections that are not all explicable, logical or practical, but elastic, imaginative, enigmatic, freewheeling and lyrical.

Sabine Russ

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Dianna Frid was born in Mexico City (1967). In 1983, she immigrated to Vancouver with her family, and, since 1995, has lived in New York City. Her work has been exhibited in Canada, The United States, Brazil, Mexico and Europe, and she has been the recipient of several grants from the Canada Council for the Arts. In 1993, Frid founded The Artery Archives Press, a publisher of one-of-a-kind and small editions of artists books.

Sabine Russ is a German writer and curator based in New York. She contributes to Neue Bildende Kunst, zingmagazine and other publications. Recent curated exhibitions include Personal Touch at Art in General, New York, and International House and Garden at the Pusan Metropolitan Art Museum, Korea (both co-curated with Gregory Volk).