FLATFILEgalleries is pleased to present the new work of Gillian Brown and Inga McCaslin Frick as its opening exhibition of the fall art season in Parallel Play.

Frick and Brown have been known for several years for their collaborative artworks, many of which are strikingly memorable video installation. FLATFILEgalleries has twice previously shown the work of these intriguing artists. This show marks the first time they will be featured side by side as individual artists in an exhibition rather than sharing authorship of the pieces. Although each has gone her separate way, the work still resonates from a similar place in the intellect. A shared interest in things quantum shows that the women are still in synch, even if they are no longer making work together per se.

Gillian Brown studied art at Brown and RISD, and received her MFA in Photography from the University of California, Los Angeles. She has been awarded ten grants and fellowships including a prestigious National Endowment for the Arts Grant for $20,000, and most recently a Bunting Fellowship from Radcliffe/Harvard. She has shown her work across the US, and been reviewed/written about in over 50 publications including Artweek, Time/Life Books The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Boston Globe and Camerawork. Her work is contained in the collections of Centre George Pompidou and the Bibliotheque National, Paris, The Seattle Art Museum, Andover, Princeton and Cal Arts Museums, among others.

Brown speaks of the new work for this show, “For the current show I embarked on a series of pieces informed by: creation myths from around the world; recent scientific work on how existence comes into being (including cosmology and string theory); and my own sense of how something comes out of nothing in our consciousness and our perception. One work aligns scientific talk (early big bang ideas) with magicians' hands pulling things out of thin air. In another my voice muses about how there was nothing in the beginning, but really this nothing was a sort of nothingness (or "somethingness"). Meanwhile the video for this piece shows reverse footage of smoke rings dissolving. Amorphous smoke gathers to form rings, or zeroes--a sort of nothingness that is something. Both of these pieces have their humor as well as wonder. Another work conflates the birth of the physical world with waking up. For a fourth work, a stream of metaphorically connected imagery, suggesting emergent thoughts, is projected on a translucent shell-shaped “brain” suspended in a wire-frame head.” Into Quantum Physics? Then don’t miss this show!

Inga McCaslin Frick holds two MFAs, one in painting, and one in digital art, which explains her love of mixed media. She has received numerous grants and awards, including a prestigious Bunting Fellowship at Harvard. Frick has shown extensively throughout the US, and has been reviewed in Art in America several times. A highly conceptual artist, Frick has requested the following as a description of her new work; “Playful and inventive, Frick takes the renaissance vocabulary of spatial illusion and strips it of its realistic rationale to produce startling works that delight and gently bewilder. As the sound of a thunderclap is instantaneously incorporated into a dream, so objective and subjective reality interact and seamlessly combine in these delightful and gently philosophical works.”