Evidence of the Material World features sculptures, mixed media works and artist’s books; each project reflects Frid’s inventive integration of diverse material processes. For this exhibition, the pieces differ from each other in format, scale, media and execution, yet as a group they behave like distinct planets that orbit around a shared premise-each piece is triggered by a textual event that Frid has distilled, processed, and translated into a material manifestation.

The trigger-texts, as Frid calls them, are fragments from sources as commonplace as a dictionary definition or as intricate as an epic poem. In each work the trigger-text becomes an occasion to ponder how language both describes and obscures phenomena both intimate and impersonal: death, love and being; time, space and light. Whether a little or a lot of the trigger-text remains, in every instance the source language is no more than a splinter in the naming of the works. The works are at once gestures and descriptions of time (process) and of fact (the material evidence of that process and of the things it transforms).

Raised in Mexico City and Vancouver, Dianna Frid currently lives in Chicago. Her work builds on a longstanding concern with architecture and with re-imagining literary and scientific representations of natural phenomena. For several years Frid has been making and exhibiting books, objects, and installations that join mixed media, sculpture, and works on paper. Her work has been shown in galleries in the USA and abroad and at numerous public venues including PS1-MOMA (NY), The Drawing Center (NY), The Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) and the Neues Kunstforum (Cologne). Frid is Assistant Professor in Studio Arts in the College of Architecture and the Arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has received grants from The Canada Council for the Arts and a Chicago Artadia Award. Recently she was a resident at in John Hejduk’s Wall House 2 Foundation in Groningen, where she will be creating a site-specific project for 2013.

Also featured in the exhibition is a recent edition project by Dianna Frid called On the Modification of Clouds (After L.H.). This suite of four lithographs was beautifully printed by Bud Shark and published by Shark’s Ink in Boulder.

On Saturday October 22 at 1:00 pm join us in the gallery for a conversation about the exhibition between Dianna Frid and Julie Rodrigues-Widlholm, the Pamela Alper Associate Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

In the off space, we’re offering a selection of recent works on paper by Leslie Baum, Todd Chilton, Peter Fagundo and Cary Smith. Leslie Baum’s paper works include the use of watercolor, gouache and collage. Todd Chilton is showing new gouache paintings on paper that reflect his ever-evolving interest in abstraction and pattern. These new pieces were generated from the same source material as the paintings but come to a state of resolution with a nice sense of informality and humor. Peter Fagundo, whose work with found material is always rigorous, is offering a set of three sculptures from cardboard, wood and paint. We’re very happy to include new colored pencil drawings by East Coast artist Cary Smith. This group of drawings compliments his Splat show presented earlier this year at Feature, Inc. in New York.

Wade Guyton produces “monochromes” from simple image files that are printed on canvas with a ink-jet printer. The technology is deliberately stressed by commanding the computer to print a relatively small file over a large canvas area and by pulling at the material as it feeds through the printer, forcing breaks and stutters in the scan lines. Gaps and errors disrupt smooth function—the printer skips and drops the images as one would scratch a record on a turntable. In his work, Guyton understands how those digital files, clearly derived from “weak” sources, can be relocated through aggressively directed material and process.

The imagery in Cheryl Donegan’s paintings comes directly from millions of Jpegs posted daily on the internet. The flotsam and jetsam on eBay and Craigslist, uploaded catalog inventory, and all the blog pages that no one has time to look at. The frantic pace of clicking from screen to screen inspires compositions in her paintings that overlap, obscure, hint and distract. Her sense of space, building off the fracturing of Cubism, follows the logic of junkspace: the endlessly additive, thin, permanently unrealized space of cities littered with cranes, Grand Opening banners and abandoned storefronts.

In Tom Meacham’s work, the Untitled paintings and the Fuzagi paintings both announce a state of uncertainty: a title, and a legitimate identity. This negative approach, this self-erasure, is nonetheless broadcast in the strongest way possible: the garish colors of the grid painting, indeterminately selected by feeding randomly generated numbers into a computer program, are a return to zero, semiotics, an imposter, and simultaneously an argument for the spectacle in painting. And in spite of its surrealist legacy, the painting that announces THIS IS NOT A FUGAZI T-SHIRT cancels out not only its identity as a painting, but also ideas of economy and authorship.

Each of these artists share the idea of “weakness.” Erasure, lack of closure and misuse puts them firmly within the realm of what Boris Groys terms the “ultra-modern”—a fast moving society with little time to resolve or complete images, only to keep clicking; discarding one project for the next; oscillating between the poles of outlandish luxury and debased realism. They displace the weak image within the technology of the digital and announce the latest move in a paradox between so much and too little.

In Ryan Fenchel‘s recent work, metonymy drives the discourse. Objects, images and ideas link up with one another to move meaning outside and beyond any literal association that might limit the reading. Quoting Steve Reinke in a statement about Ryan Fenchel’s work, he says “things don’t stand in for other things, abstract concepts are not allegorized as concrete things or characters. Instead, there are potentially endless chains of associations, things are substituted for other things more or less like them. Things rub against one another, are arranged—sometimes in regulated geometric patterns, sometimes like stars in a constellation—and there is always something contingent in these arrangements: components could be switched or substituted without the autonomy of the Fenchel world being compromised.” Like the other artists in Kabinett 6, the accumulation and relocation of cultural material is the primary objective in these humble but mysterious works.

For Melissa Pokorny, found objects constitute the starting point for elaborate constructions that address gender, the public and private self, the nature/culture divide, and most recently, the connections between “things” as potent containers capable of active agency and the deeply haunted sense of place that clings to landscape and personal possessions. The unremarkable histories of everyday objects become activated and heightened as they move into new situations and re-position within a larger tableau. The compulsion to collect and the status of marginal objects and things is a focus in these works. The rarified and the quotidian work together to create momentary and speculative connections. Reveries. Fragmentary narratives emerge on the nature of loss and desire and the power of magical thinking. The stuff comes from estate sales; the photographs were taken at the Funk Prairie Home and Gem & Mineral Museum in Shirley, Illinois. This collection, amassed over a lifetime by hybrid seed baron LaFayette Funk, claims to be the largest privately held collection of rocks and natural ephemera in the United States. It is a “kabinett” for Kabinett 5.

Within his most recent projects, the Chicago artist Andreas Fischer has been producing works that come about through fragmentary impulses. Utilizing small material statements occurring within individual paintings, among paintings in series, and in relation to images in the world, he’s been working toward revealing raw information rather than refined and resolute declarations. By intentionally constructing the uncertainty of an unresolved outcome, he guides the viewer away from questions of how ideas must fit together to arrive at a clear destination, and instead reveals experience through process. He’s interested in the possibilities for these fragments to swirl around each other, sometimes mixing, but never obligated to interrelate. Fischer’s paintings hang on the shell of representation. He uses the language of traditional painting subjects as markers for unburdened meaning and as the armature upon which to hang his loose network of gestures. Ultimately, for the viewer, it’s the deliberate instability of the painting structure that creates a satisfying tension between clarity and hesitation.

Britta Bogers’ work in Kabinett 4 is a small fraction of an expansive practice that includes large-scale paper works and paintings. By limiting the focus here to a specific group selected from hundreds,we glimpse into the practice of an artist who is continually making decisions that move form, line and composition forward. These drawings, made with acrylic and pigment colors on primed paper, are defined by a distinct set of chromatic decisions. The result is immediate and direct; well past a sketch but never taken to over-definition. The structural forms come from memories of concrete things; but those memories are blurred and fused with other influences, leaving the images feeling familiar but still elusive. Britta Bogers’ drawings are made with a light touch, but securely anchored by the masterful use and understanding of her visual language.

For more than 10 years, Mark Holmes has been making sculpture from common materials that riff on functional construction. The work never stays there though. With subtle pronouncements revealed through the joinery and other key elements of the facture, Holmes makes poetic and nuanced declarations about form, space and light. The sculpture can be languid or highly dynamic, but it always shifts as you move from one point to another. His past productions of floor and wall objects referenced vaguely functional objects, but here, things are slippery. These objects feel domestic in scale but his use of color creates a tricky deflection that leads the allusion to functionality astray. In linen, wood and pigment, his recent standing sculptures are clearly figurative but feel more like sentries than moving bodies. Surfaces striated with horizontal seams keep us aware of the floor and hold them firmly in place. But in the end, their emphatic color and a weird sense of direction keep these characters active.

Jered Sprecher’s studio practice explores the “handwriting” of humankind. He collects the markings of cultural communication and filters and processes these notations into complex visual constructions. Laden with a dense vocabulary culled from endless sources derived from his immediate surroundings, Sprecher’s paintings, drawings and installations reflect on how we process information and make sense of “noise” in our environment. Kabinett 4 includes a group of new paintings and a Project Table with source material from all three artists in the exhibition.

For Kabinett 3, Dana DeGiulio is using the gallery as a expanded drawing field. Her installation is both a stage set for the entire exhibition and a composition-in-the-round. Using found and manufactured material, she choreographs her moves to pace and direct the way we negotiate the space. While passing through, we see weird stuff moving up and off wall; often rudely interrupting the sanctity of the white space and the other works in the exhibition. This is pure expression slowed down by an awareness that the components have been carefully cast in her studio, brought to the gallery as raw material and then composed on site. The acrylic paint peels stretch and hang between corners of the room; strings connect objects; plastic lays over and nearby other works. There are also paintings in the exhibition, but they’re presented not as discreet objects but as components annexed for the greater good. As her practice reveals, the work for Kabinett 3 shows a desire to make gesture variable, portable, isolated, something other than raw expression. In her hands, the mark is an aftereffect, a consequence of matter and interference.

As a highly skilled potter, the Danish artist Marie Torbensdatter Hermann brings a nuanced touch to the small cups and pots that often come off the wheel in her studio. These lovingly crafted manifestations express a desire to make sensual the prosaic utensil and take it beyond usefulness to a point of pensive reflection. Memory is clearly at work in her process. The pieces are steeped in personal history and attempt to capture certain feelings that come from the knowledge of familiar things. That delicacy has recently given over to a newer, more assertive approach to object building that relies less on the wheel-thrown vessel but moves toward the roughness of hand built sculptures. These recent pieces often feel landscape-based and suggest forms cast from nature rather than from the hand. She is also placing these new works in relation to contradictory elements that distort scale and begin to feel like small collections of eccentric discoveries.

Continuing their reflection and analysis of modernity in art, Paul Cowan and Matt Stolle question, analyze, confirm and modify tropes and conventional tactics of the art object and artistic practice. Through their explicit references to the history of painting and modernism, the works here exemplify understanding while analyzing the rhetorical nature of art. Through experience we understand how to experience, possibly gaining an ability to control experience, and potentially losing a variable of perspectives on the experience.

In Causality Without Cause, Cowan and Stolle reconsider the general relations of cause and effect, realizing their roles to be more subjective in the cognitive experience. Through an attempted singularity and isolation of ‘effect’, they search for the origin or ‘cause’ of the work. Within this reassociation, the result is a kind of reversed order; effect and cause. The work certainly celebrates its aesthetic successes (potential effects), threatening acute perception to a point of obtuse and alternate thought. Through this we are left with an analysis of cognition in general.

In the Off Space, Thomas Roach presents Wheatstone Stereoscope. Made with graphite, carbon, magazine pages and silkscreen, these frank constructions treat a mélange of mass-media images as text and present a disambiguated and conversely idiosyncratic Modern language. Roach avoids composition by presenting his pictures in the middle of larger standardized supports, a strategy that makes his works appear similar—as simple commodities. The title of the exhibition, Wheatstone Stereoscope, refers to an early optical device designed by Charles Wheatstone and to Roach’s project overall: the reproduction of mass-media images in parts, presentations of which tease at significance and coerce viewers into acknowledging their part in creating meaning.

To create Skies in Between, Renate Wolff started by identifying the individual characteristics and architectural components of the space. The walls, the floor, the door, the single vertical post, the ceiling joists and all the complicated lighting elements influenced the schematic of this complex series of conduits that link the painting to its support. Color also brings into question aspects of the room through contrast and assertive graphic clarity. How one experiences Skies in Between brings to mind the criteria through which one traditionally understands and views painting. Form, composition and emphasis are important elements of the overall structure here, but the work breaks the constraints of the rectangle to become a field layered with planes that are both actual and perceived.

Works on paper by Berlin artists Christian Bilger, Michael Bause, Ruprecht Dreher, Frank Eltner, Dirk Lebahn, Seraphina Lenz, Christiane Schlosser, Renate Wolff and Julia Ziegler in the off space.

Erik Neff in the Off Space.

Heiner Blumenthal in the offspace. Recent evocative black and white photographs and non-objective ink drawings—each informing the other—in the first devening projects + editions exhibition for this Cologne-based artist.

Home Wreckage includes work by John Arndt, Claire Ashley, Alexander Braun, The Franks, Patrick Gavin, Marie Hermann, Roxane Hopper, Peter Power, Anders Ruhwald, Wolfgang Schlegel, Roman Signer and Franz West.

Redden at d p + e will be accompanied by a 48 page catalog featuring work from the exhibition and essays by Horst Bredekamp, Manon Bursian and Marc Ries.

Time Trauma Drama and Rhyme is a group show organized by Jason Pickleman that presents visual and literal meditations on the nature and human experience of Time. As a rumination on our relationship to temporal experience, the exhibition brings together artists working in a variety of mediums, along with a group of objects that express time in a very explicit way. Can we really grasp the nature of 30,000 years ago? What about one million or four billion years ago? What about the spaces between the second hands on the clock; those small gaps that masquerade as PAUSE? This show considers these questions through the works of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Jin Lee, Jared Madere, Casey Ann Wasniewski, Chris Altschuler, and the focus of the exhibition, five geological samples on loan from University of Colorado, Boulder geologist Stephen Mojzsis. Featured on raised pedestals in the center of the gallery, the rocks present examples of mind-bending proportion: the oldest rock in the solar system-a piece of “space rock” (4.567 billion years old), microdiamonds extracted from a meteorite whose date pre-dates the sun, and a sample of the world’s oldest micro-fossil.