Frid, Dianna (Can)

First solo project in 1998, crox 77.

Second crox-project, Twelve Releases (crox 184), June-July 2006.
Extract from what the artist wrote about her work: ABOUT MY WORK, PART 2.

I make works that range from artist books to collages, and from
installation to sewen pieces. My works are material responses to existing
images, shapes and things in the world, and, in that respect, I am interested
in the relationship between representation, portrayal, the symbolic, and the
concrete. I explore this concreteness through a physicality that synthesizes
the hand-made in both familiar and inventive ways, and that relies on process
as a means to develop a honed technique./ Wallace
Stevens alluded to pressing back on the pressures of reality through the act of
imaginative making. I see in my work that aspiration, to press back on existing
things through imaginative making and to have that making carry its own
authority. This authority alerts us to variations and subtleties that open up
the space of reflection and, through materiality, alerts us to the
voluptuousness of looking./ I am interested in the tension that exists between
the tools and the means with which the world is described and the world that
exists in spite of these tools. I see my work as a way to point to these
tensions and to evoke other possible ways of understanding things and images,
ways that encompass the complexities of desire, contradiction, metaphor, and
attention to form and sense experience.  [Original in English]

STORIES IN FABRIC – Review by Edith Doove, De Standaard,
Wednesday 29 April 1998. Croxhapox belongs to the dying race of independent
exhibition spaces. The large number of short shows proves that it fulfills a need.
To that end, artists from the whole gamut of contemporary art are invited, old
and young, beginning and more or less renowned. / For some time now, not only
the cellar is used but also the first floor. This time Diana [sic] Frid, the young
Canadian artist based in New York, joins in. The exhibition was co-curated by
curator Kie Ellens from the Netherlands. Frid has a very particular way of
working. She likes to use textiles and needlework like embroidery. She finds
her images in all kind of didactic books and transfers them to the fabric. Then
she cuts it up and recombines it into labyrintine forms or books./ Frid prefers
maps of musea and images from first aid manuals for her imagery. Her guideline
is her research into the narrative and the possibilities to represent it in a
non-linear way. The appearance and disappearance of story lines, but also the
matter as such, is clearly the leitmotiv. Apart from a few lesser works a very
successful exhibition.