Erik Frydenborg

Shear Stress

March 27 - May 1, 2021

The Pit is pleased to present Shear Stress, the gallery’s third solo exhibition by LA-based Erik Frydenborg. On view from March 28 – May 1, 2021, with a socially-distanced public reception from 11am-5pm on Saturday March 27th, this exhibition consists of five new painted basswood sculptures.

Borrowing concepts and visual grammar from earth science and information studies, Frydenborg continues to collect, warp, and translate graphic sources and illustrated materials from archaic archives and “increasingly obsolete vessels” such as encyclopedias, discarded books, and vintage science journals, into three-dimensional objects that look like remnant, atavistic collisions of primordial past with an unnervingly slick and aggressive future that — if cinema horror holds true — will imminently launch chaos and apocalypse. While his process still includes digitally synthesizing collages to develop design mockups that inspire biomorphic objects, his prior polyurethane plastic and rubber casting practice has morphed into an embrace of quasi-rustic woodworking. A TurboPlane blade on an angle grinder achieves rough shape, while finery occurs through power-sanding; brush-priming; mapping abstract computer-plotted stencils onto surfaces; then hand-painting. This painstaking operation embodies Frydenborg’s appreciation of analog / digital interchanges, with nods to handmade toys; vintage anatomical models; indigenous polychrome pottery; and that“country craft aesthetic within a regressively colonial setting” that Folk art occupied in his rural Pennsylvania childhood. While the new materials manipulate and remodel Pop and Kitsch through genre dissection, Frydenborg remains fascinated by disinformation and “well-preserved traces of things that no longer exist.” He says that “the idea of even attempting to present a fixed representation of truth seems increasingly outmoded and even ludicrous in the face of our current information ecosystems… The conversion of concrete objectivity into abstract conjecture seems like a good approximation of what memory does to knowledge.”

Like fossils or ambered prehistoric insects, these sculptures imply evidence of “intense force: distorting the resting shape of once living information.” Shear Stress is a geological term for a deformation response that rocks and land have to environmental disruption, like compression and expansion along fault lines. Evidenced by alterations of texture, partitioning, crenellation, fracturing, or complete mineral restructuring, the study of shear is central to plate tectonics. Along the San Andreas fault, think of how much shear stress surrounds us, manifest in the layered rocks we see exposed in canyons and on hillsides. If information is as unstable and shifty as our physical landscapes, then collection, classification, manipulation, and storage of data is central to survival. Notably, this new body of work was made during what Frydenborg calls “our collective reckoning with epistemic crisis— Q / Stop the Steal / Anti-vaxx … rooted in the balkanization and distortion of facts”; these sculptures indicate poetic efforts to protect, retrieve, and disseminate information. Color palettes borrowed from ergonomic design elements on practical objects such as sneakers and toothbrushes hint at functional use; these are vital communication tools and records as well as natural history museum specimens.

With stretched, extended, and composited lopped off bits of text that accentuate and exaggerate sonic properties, the titles — Krrrilllarrro, Suuulasuuuri — require slurring or speaking in slow motion, like vocals on a Screw Tape or avant-garde poetry. Maybe these utterances are the wood talking, hinting at what details should stick in a dumpster-fire sea of apocryphal anecdote.

Erik Frydenborg received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and an MFA from the University of Southern California. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Gated Snare at The Pit(Glendale; 2017); Undertones: Biomorphic Art in Los Angeles at Cal Poly University Art Gallery (San Luis Obispo; 2019) 100 Sculptures at Anonymous (Ciudad de México; 2018) KNOWLEDGES at Mount Wilson Observatory (2017). He has also exhibited at Regina Rex; Team Gallery; Rainbow In Spanish; M+B; M. LeBlanc, Albert Baronian (Brussels), and Shanaynay (Paris).