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Lynda
Frese: Collage Prints
by Alison Smith, Curator
The Tate Britain Gallery, London
Lynda Frese has an instinct for accumulating visual
data. Over the years she has amassed a vast anthology
of images from which she assembles her collages. Bodies,
buildings, objets trouves’, old photographs and
ex-votos are placed in evocative, ambiguous contexts
as if by a magical process the ordered system of the
muniment room has been disturbed by some unseen force.
It would appear that she has consciously relinquished
control over composition, content to be guided by the
subjects themselves, as if in a dream where the scenario
continually shifts focus. And like in a dream it seems
one can never quite penetrate the labyrinth tantalizingly
opened up to the spectator. Instead we are offered fleeting
points of recognition-fragments that float in a paradoxical
subterranean-aeriel realm.
Frese describes her recent works as “layered visual
archaeologies in which myth and history co-mingle,”
although her interest in archetypes has accrued over
many years, nurtured by extensive travels in North America,
the Caribbean and Europe. For the last fifteen years
she has been teaching photography and design at the
University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where she has
developed an interest in computer technology, in particular
digital imaging, as a means of manipulating and dissolving
boundaries of time and place. Frese makes her own photographs
in black and white and also collects images from a variety
of sources. These are then electronically scanned and
re-assembled in differing states of transparency to
form a seamless collage or composite print. She works
in black and white or color, depending on the subject
she has in mind; sometimes color is added later in the
digital imaging process.
An important feature of Frese’s earlier work is
the way it evokes the American South: “I respond
to the ambience of French Louisiana, the way’
the climate is so close to your skin, the Creole spoken
in my neighborhood, the seductive lushness of place,
place is so distinctive here.” She is also interested
in Roman Catholic culture and how it has characterized
the South, alongside the influence of Voodou. This interest
in her immediate environment forms the basis of Reconstituting
the Vanished, a collaborative work begun in 1994 with
feminist historian Barbara Allen, also of the University
of Louisiana. The Vanished examines the lives of four
Delta women: the naturalist Caroline Dormon, Founder
of Kisatchie National Forest; Vodou Priestess Marie
Laveau of New Orleans; the builder and architect Baroness
Michaela Pontalba of the French Quarter; and the freed
slave and plantation owner Marie-Therese Coin-Coin of
Natchitoches. Although these prints were carefully researched
(being informed by biography, local history and feminist
interpretation), the distancing and potential for anarchic
playfulness encouraged by computer technology assist
the series in its ambitious intention of discovering
visual and verbal forms for the ideological processes
which have marginalized women. By subverting the linear
narratives of traditional history; Frese affiliates
herself with the current artistic revival of interest
in women’s crafts and private meaning, as well
as what can broadly be termed a post- modern spirit
of appropriation and pluralism.
In order to pursue her understanding of the ways through
which “pagan” symbols have been absorbed
into Christian iconography, Frese received a sabbatical
to study in South Europe. In 1999 she was awarded a
Fellowship at the Bogliasco Foundation near Genoa in
Italy to complete a body of work entitled Pagan Images
from the Goddess to the Madonna, a series begun at the
Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Centre for the
Arts and Humanities in 1997. Taking her themes from
Mediterranean culture, she utilised montage techniques
to communicate ideas concerning the transmission and
renewal of ancient archetypes. Sources range from Paleolithic
cave paintings such as the images of female hands, she
saw at Peche Merle in Southern France, Minoan goddess
sculptures sited at Knossos, through to the ubiquitous
popular icons of brides and the Virgin Mary which can
be seen virtually everywhere in modern Italy.
In this series, which comprises some forty works on
canvas, Frese has reverted to her earlier use of collage.
Her own photographs are combined with other images,
with paint and graphite employed for unifying and layering
effect. Several pieces incorporate flower petals and
other organic matter. Her decision to use collage was
partly pragmatic, there being no computer on hand, but
was also a means of projecting her own subjective responses.
Frustrated by the cerebral involvement with a “virtual”
image, she made a conscious decision to return to the
hand made object. The combination of cutting, pasting
and painting makes fluid traditional boundaries separating
“fine” from “decorative” art,
and she pays homage to “feminine” culture
by disavowing the objectivity and precision favoured
by masculine modernist photographic practice.
Frese positions her goddess figures in the interstices
separating sky, earth and water. They hover, or appear
submerged in water as if acknowledging the origins of
a universal mother, whose various manifestations, such
as Isis or Aphrodite, were born from the sea. Stella
Maris (Star of the Sea), plays with the association
between the Virgin’s name and the Latin word for
sea. Frese’s chthonic deities appear consoling
when they assume the form of the Madonna, but their
absence from the image is more telling, suggesting hidden
power and insight. Urns and sarcophagi suggest internment
and the preservation of energy which might erupt at
any moment. This energy is sexual, carnivalesque and
resistant to suppression. One of the highlights of her
sojourn in Italy was a visit to Valcamonica to view
the layers of petroglyphs, stretching back over ten
thousand years. This “lexicon of image making,”
where pagan imagery is both effaced and appropriated
by Christianity inspired her to create her own palimpsest
images where past and present coalesce and struggle
for the upper level. The structures of civilization
are thus never stable in Frese’s vision. A naked
body disturbs the harmony of a pattern of Gothic ribbed
vaulting; twisted Solomonic columns metamorphose into
a strident diva; Minoan goddesses mimic a row of rigid
saints which adorn the walls of a ruined church.
Frese’s interest in the peripheral areas of the
human psyche have led her to place the irritating and
alien aspects of culture center stage. Hence the insects
and gargoyles that inhabit several compositions. The
Green Man is yet another example of the hidden. Here
a bearded stone head issues water from its mouth into
a pool from which a cropped figure reaches out desirous
of the seductive gold beans (in fact gold- coated chocolates)
displayed in a bowl which glow as if conjured up by
some mysterious alchemical process. Nettles, a dialogue
between fallopian and phallic forms, fuses concepts
of defiance and sustenance. The doorknocker and sharp
hypodermic points suggest inviolability, while the woven
configurations at the bottom may allude to the ancient
custom of using nettles as flax for weaving strong nets
for fishing.
Nature comes across as a resistant and unruly force
in these montages, and Frese makes no attempt to master
or regulate its impulses. While she revels in abundance
and instinctive response, her works also display a tension
between sensual abandon and an urge for control. This
tension is relayed by the compositions themselves: their
heaving perspectives, the sticky visceral shapes that
punctuate the surface, the precarious positioning of
objects. The cutting and splicing involved in the making
of the collages introduce a note of violence, especially
regarding the naked body which is often shown trapped
in frightened isolation or threatened by penetration.
This hint of mutability is off-set by the consolation
provided by the icons; as if reminding us that suffering
and need for condolence are trans-historic realities.
The disturbing and elusive qualities of Frese’s
montages save them from nostalgia and sentiment, from
being seen as expressions of yearning for an Earth spirit
in an avowedly materialistic age. Her message is rather
one of fragmentation and loss with the added hope that
the detritus from the past has true value and might
suddenly be rekindled, perhaps via the very technology
that threatens its survival.
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The Faces of the Sacred in the Work of Lynda Frese
by Remo Palmirani, President dell’Accademia dell’Ex-Libris
Bologna
Perhaps it will be surprising, but I believe that the
work of Lynda Frese is characterized by a supernatural
aspect so intense and considerable as to place it fully
within the realm of sacred art. Understood in its truest
and traditional meaning, the sacred is that which is
hidden and inviolable and, therefore, does not pertain
to the material world. This is why one can not comprehend
the significance of this work without entering into
a different dimension, one that obligates us to follow
paths that are not immediately obvious. We need to employ
a particular methodology that is based on the knowledge
and value of symbols.
It is through the universal language of symbols that
Frese leads us into an ancient and forgotten world in
which only one who knows how to see can unveil the mystery.
Here we find the ongoing presence of those times and
those places in which the race of the gods mingled with
the race of humans. These presences speak to us, at
times clearly and at other times obliquely, of the era
when ancient values had not yet been obliterated by
the dominance of Christian ideology.
Little by little, in a continuous play of evocations
and of recalls, the mythic epoch of the Great Mother,
the goddess who summed up in herself the highest values
of the spirit, is embodied. Whether she is called Isis,
Demeter-Ceres, or Cybele, the kingdom of the Mother,
the so called Mutterrecht, present throughout the Mediterranean
basin as the sign of female power, becomes the recurrent
and leading theme of Lynda Frese’s work.
The artist represents the sacred power of woman by means
of its most characteristic manifestations. Thus Water,
symbol of.generation and also of destruction, and the
Moon, sacred symbol of becoming, and also the Earth,
the principle of fertile reception set against the Sky,
the principle of insemination, all these appear here
as the immortal protagonists of a narrative that is
beyond time and space but which, none theless, finds
perpetual correspondences within history.
According to the law of analogy (from which no explorer
of, tradition can depart), the Earth, reminiscent of
underground darkness, is black because the cave of origin
is immersed in the most complete darkness; but it is
also a necessary prelude to a successful movement toward
the light. The female principle of being and thus Isis,
Cybele, and Ceres were often imaged by the color black.
Black is the color of “prime matter” in
the so called Great Work of alchemy; and it is fascinating
to discover that the ancient symbolic name of Egypt
was “chemi,” i.e. black earth, from which
came the Arabic work al-chemia.
Therefore it is not by chance that the Christian Madonna
(who has many points of contact with Isis and other
female deities, both earthly and heavenly) frequently
is represented by the same color. This is the final
confirmation that we are dealing with the same female
cult, one which has assumed different names in different
times and places while maintaining persistent symbolic
traits. As Charles Austran has written, “Her attributes
have remained unchanged wherever she is found. She is
always free and virginal, an immaculate agent of purity.
But she is also the mother of her consort, by means
of immaculate conception, and the mother of the gods
and of universal life by means of the kiss of her son.”
Although the feminine principle is the major theme of
all of Lynda Frese’s work, there are also many
references to the male figure, interpreted not in opposition
but rather in terms of the divinity as a union of opposites.
In an occult manner, or openly (as when the artist represents
the second person of the Christian Trinity), the Great
Goddess takes on Gnostic values, so that she is not
only mother and son, but also bride and groom, and thus
unified in perfect androgyny. Androgyny should be understood
as the supernatural union of male and female, as the
dissolution of sexual components rather than as an ambiguous
combination of the two sexes in a bisexual being. Thus,
as Heraclitus and many traditional authors taught, the
divine is created by the union of contraries. The androgyne
and the alchemical “rebus,” or riddle, are
reflected in many of the works of Lynda Frese. They
“chase” or “play tag” with one
another in analogies that reveal the correspondences
which tie each individual thing to the whole of life.
Precisely because the sacred can not be confined and
conditioned by the insidious sirens of reality and truthfulness
the artist’s language is often surreal, overwhelming,
so far from current formulations that it liberates us
from normal aesthetic and moral concerns. As in the
most typical surrealist images, the models derive from
the inner rather than the external world. When examined
knowledgeably, they prove themselves to be essentially
intuitive, and thus feminine.
If, as Antoine de Saint-Exupery has said, it is true
that “the essential is invisible to our eyes,”
and that “to look does not mean to see,”
it will be easier to understand that the profound meaning
of Lynda Frese’s work can be understood only by
going beyond our first and limiting sense of its non-contemporaneity
in order to move to a different level in which we can
reach that which is beyond time and unchanging. And
it is to this world of ancient values, a world that
had to give way to a God who claimed a monopoly on the
religious sensibility and on the idea of the sacred
that Lynda Frese returns, standing tall rather than
trembling and on her knees.
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Lynda Frese:
Mississippi Museum of Art
by Rene Paul Barilleaux, Director of Exhibitions and
Collections/Chief Curator
Mississippi Museum of Art
Lynda Frese creates a world in which the past and future
are filtered through the present. Her photo-assemblages
and computer collages present a visual anthology of
the spiritual realm, melding together images based in
historical facts, popular legends, personal memories
and aesthetic concerns. Frese takes her viewers on a
kaleidoscopic voyage through time and space, never to
reach the end of one adventure before departing on the
next.
This exhibition is the first to survey both Frese’s
“cut and paste” photographic assemblages
and her more recent computer-made collages. Drawn from
1981 through the present, together these works offer
insight into the artist’s personal journey from
using traditional photographic techniques to her discovery
of computer imaging. This non- chronological gallery
presentation galvanizes inter-relationships between
all of the works, whether physically layered from found
and fabricated photographs or joined on the computer
monitor and printed in small and large scale.
An important element in Frese’s art is the way
in which it evokes the American South and, in particular,
southwestern Louisiana where she currently lives. Raised
in Rhode Island, Frese spent a decade in California
and an extended period in France prior to coming to
the region in 1986. This relocation profoundly influenced
her art in both its content and subject: explorations
into the spiritual world were intensified through images
drawn from the dense, semi-tropical Louisiana climate;
the region’s strong emphasis on its colorful past
and blend of cultural mythologies; the omnipresence
of Roman Catholicism and religious superstition; and
the undercurrent of voodoo pervasive in this part of
the United States. In southwest Louisiana, Frese found
a sensuality which captivates both her mind and spirit.
The earlier collages included here are characterized
by their strong evidence of the artist’s hand-Frese’s
own photographic prints are combined with found and
appropriated pictures which are subsequently altered
with drawing, painting and more collage. They are thick
and lush, with imagery reminiscent of earlier Surrealists
who explored similar stream-of -conscious dream worlds.
In the recent works, from 1991 on, the images are joined
and rejoined on the computer monitor to create seamless
collages which offer a more unified world within the
work’s perimeter.
Reconstituting the Vanished, a suite of five computer
prints from 1994, explores the life of Marie Thereze
Coin-Coin, a freed female slave who built Melrose Plantation
in eighteenth-century Louisiana. Combining biographical
facts with local legends and Frese’s contemporary
interpretations, the prints reconstruct the story of
Marie Thereze’s life:as a series of assumptions,
suppositions and fleeting impressions. The works’
titles offer additional insight into the artist’s
thinking: Slavery, Prosperity, Bewitchment, Tree House
and Cane River.
Like a shaman, Lynda Frese conjures up pictures of otherworldly
people, places and events. Now with the aid of electronic
technology, Frese is able to strengthen their verisimilitude
and create stronger pictorial truths. In the hands of
this artist, fact often gives way to fiction and vice
versa.
And history never—and always—repeats itself.
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