Eleanor Frick

SAIC SHOWS 2022 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Graduates

SAIC SHOWS 2022 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Master of Fine Arts in Studio, Fiber and Material Studies

Frick is a MFA candidate in the Fiber and Material Studies department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently, Frick is primarily focused in weaving, but overlapping elements from multiple media (most commonly painting and photography) are a large part of her practice. She earned a Post-Baccalaureate certificate from SAIC in spring of 2020 and her BA in Studio and Italian language from Franklin & Marshall College in 2017. Most recently, she participated in the 2020 Post-Baccalaureate Annual as well as the pop-up exhibition, Super-Legit Exhibition 2020, curated independently by current and recently graduated MFA candidates. In the past she has shown in and assistant-curated exhibitions at 44AD artspace in Bath, UK, and the Phillips Museum of Art in Lancaster, PA.

Eleanor Frick - you won’t eat food with metal forks because you can taste the iron, but drinking your Americano from a stainless steel pot tastes just fine

you won’t eat food with metal forks because you can taste the iron, but drinking your Americano from a stainless steel pot tastes just fine, Detail, 2021, Jacquard woven, approx. 48 x 48 in.

Collective memory is preserved through story-telling, a ritual integral to family experience, but as time passes, the stories often bear an increasingly warped resemblance to reality. In my weavings, I interrogate the idea of 20th century American immigrant identity through the journey of my own family from “foreigners” to “Americans” in just three generations. The process of gathering and weaving together these confused scraps of memory and homeland (American and otherwise,) creates a new fabric of memory both wistful and wary. Responding to Marianne Hirsch’s writings on post-memory, and the idea of a “post-generation” acting as the heirs, collateral damage, and the interpreters of their parents’ and grandparents’ experiences, I emotionally process and criticize the aftermath of my family’s WWI migration to America. The weaving itself becomes a representation of loss and retrieval, but the unsettling glitching and splicing of the image within diverts the instinct towards nostalgia. Attempting to make sense of this uneasy inheritance raises questions about the American identity as a modern social hierarchy while a glitchy material sensibility represents a refusal to over sentimentalize or accept an inheritance created on such foundations.

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