Brian Fridge

September 10—October 9, 2016

Ulterior is pleased to announce the opening of its 2016–2017 season with an exhibition of video artist Brian Fridge’s new works. 

Brian Fridge creates silent, black and white videos that explore light, matter, space, and time. Using common household materials and indoor lighting in his studio, Fridge synthesizes and record events or chains of events that invite a wide range of associations.

Two videos will be on view in the gallery, Sequence 10.1 (2010) and Sequence 8.1 (2009–2016), both exhibited for the first time.

Sequence 10.1 (4 minutes, black and white, silent) is based on a single event recorded by the camera as it unfolds. The unedited video depicts an oval-shaped form, resembling a moon or egg and glowing in the darkness, as it slowly undergoes an enigmatic transformation. Suggesting disintegration from within or an eclipse of the surface, the form eventually gives way to darkness as though melting into black water.

By contrast to Sequence 10.1’s use of one take, Sequence 8.1 is a densely edited montage of brief, unconnected segments recorded by the artist in 2009 and 2016 and then assembled into a sequence. Fridge based his editing decisions on formal connections within the imagery and an imposed, overarching structure derived from the black and white value scale. Alternating between black and white at the start, the mostly vacant fields of video texture progress toward a common middle grey. Sequence 8.1 is Fridge's most minimal video to date. The monochrome fields are not expressions of an absolute, but rather imply voids of space or time between events.

Fridge has said, “If the passage of time is the perception of motion, then how motion is articulated is interesting to me." The two videos in the exhibition share similar formal and conceptual interests but differ greatly in pace. Sequence 10.1 records an uninterrupted event, with changes occurring at a relatively slow pace, whereas Sequence 8.1 is an edited sequence of disparate, rapidly occurring events. Both works exemplify Fridge's consistent method of recording actual spatial and material phenomena rather than simulating them digitally. Through an economy of means, Fridge films and edits his footage to achieve streams of imagery that evoke cyclical processes whose precise nature is hard to identify.

Brian Fridge is a native of Fort Worth, TX, and currently lives and works in Dallas, TX. Fridge obtained his BFA from the University of North Texas in 1994 and completed an MFA at the University of Texas at Dallas in 2011. His video work was exhibited in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, the Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth, TX, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, and many others. Recent exhibitions include: Gatherings, Fergus McCaffrey, New York, NY (2015); Brian Fridge, Ateliers Höherweg, Düsseldorf, Germany (solo show, 2013); and Video Lab, DiverseWorks, Houston, TX (2011). The production of Sequence 8.1 is partially supported by a Nasher Sculpture Center micro-grant that Fridge received in 2015.