Dianna Frid is interested in the tension between the systems used to describe the world and the world that exists in spite of these systems. Culling from sources that relate to cartography, astronomy, architecture, botany and geology, she reconfigures diagrams and shapes that result in drawings, collages and sculptures. Her work addresses the relationship between the imaginable, the known and the unknown.

Frid uses images such as staircases, craters, rivers, ships and Ferris wheels as emblems that loosely evoke mapping, movement, time and lingering anachronisms. Crater and Transport includes a large-scale work entitled Launch Pad for Ferris Wheel (from the To Go to the Moon Series).

Another work in the exhibition, Transport II, refers to the Palm House at Kew Gardens, which claims to house the oldest potted plant in a European collection: an African Palm tree that has obsessed Frid since her visit to the Gardens in 1998. Frid turns the greenhouse into a time machine, one that protects and projects the palm into the future.

Crater and Transport is Dianna Frid’s first solo exhibition at Julia Friedman Gallery. A School of the Art Institute of Chicago graduate, Frid has shown at venues such as The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Pittsburg; Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York; Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder; Gallery 400, Chicago; Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago; and CROXHAPOX, Gent, Belgium. A recent Artadia award recipient, Frid will present a solo project at P.S.1, Long Island City, New York in November/December 2005 and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in February 2006. She teaches at The University of Chicago.