Dreaming in Science Fiction

2009

Digital prints, CNC-machined plywood, white house paint, pencil stenciled on wall

Dimensions variable. Installation shown (Southern Alberta Art Gallery) is approximately 10 x 3 feet.

from essay by Ryan Doherty (Curator of Between Material and Imagination):

“With colorful probes attached to his head, Fredrickson monitors his movements while sleeping after having watched one of a selection of sci-fi movies released in the year of his birth, 1977. Each movement is captured through a software program that digitally manipulates the form of a virtual pillow and then translates the virtual form into a physical sculpture using plastic lumber and a CNC router. The final pieces are elegant white objects loaded with pseudoscientific and pataphysical absurdity (yet stringently adhering to a logical machine-assisted process) countered with an arbitrary if highly personal subjectivity.”

from essay by Corinna Ghaznavi (Curator of sciencefictionsciencefair) :

Fredrickson offers us a more hilarious approach to fantasy, sci-fi, psychology and illusion in his Dreaming in Science Fiction where he presents a series of ambiguous objects accompanied by images of him wearing a strange device strapped to his head. These images are taken of the artist asleep after watching a series of science fiction films made in 1977, the year in which he was born. The pseudo experiment involves charting Fredrickson’s brain activity after watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Damnation Alley, Demon Seed, Empire of the Ants, The Incredible Melting Man, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and The People That Time Forgot. Setting up strict criteria, applying objective methods, and repeating the experiment mimics a scientific experiment but simultaneously challenges the idea of an absolute hypothesis. What do stories tell us, what can fantasy enable, what role does technology play, and how is our psyche affected, are all questions that could have been posed here, but what we finally get is simply a series of objects that hover somewhere between two and three dimensions: the ‘pillows’ that are mounted on the wall and appear to reveal the data captured, are something between a graph (representational) and a thing itself (experiential). The process that Fredrickson used to make the sculptures involved using the graph data of where his head was in space while sleeping as input to distort a CAD drawing of the actual pillow. Viewing the work as a whole, piecing together the device, the graph, and the labels, we search for coherence and insight into an experiment that ultimately remains opaque to us, leaving us with more questions than answers, offering tangents rather than conclusions.

Exhibition History: Southern Alberta Art Gallery, The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Tom Thomson Art Gallery, Museum of New Ideas, Struts Gallery, Stride Art Gallery