While he covers large physical and aesthetic territories, Frelin is aware that he works in a time of limited resources––natural and artistic. His is an art for the age of global warming. Even as he goes to great lengths to create and catalogue revelatory intercessions in the environment, Frelin realizes the hubris and the ultimate impossibility of bending the world to his will and his will to the world. As a countermeasure, he makes self-criticism a central part of his process. Frelin’s aesthetic and philosophical road––twisting and turning between human and natural, between theory and practice––is treacherous, but he also shows us that the marks left in the struggle for control can serve as portentous blazes on the trail. Toby Kamps
There is a poetic behind Adam
Frelin’s work that resides in the
compelling opposition between the natural and the artificial that exposes
stark characteristics of a mundane, yet incendiary environment. Frelin
is less interested in fantasy than in real possibilities, and his fictional
constructs hover between what is accepted and what is rejected as reality.
He questions the parameters of trust and belief through a re-articulation
of fiction with the use of props and performative strategies. Frelin’s
staged events place the viewer in unreal encounters that beget desire through
fictional and suspended acts of witnessing. Frelin’s melancholic
visual language indexes a contemporary pathos, while his hypothetical situations
derive their potency from a sense of stillness. With gravitas, irony, and
a tension derived from place, Frelin creates an arresting memento mori
extracted from momentary collisions that allows the audience to suspend
(dis)belief in imagining the finality of all things. |