Timothy Frerichs
Several of Timothy Frerichs’s tender, allusive mixed-media works on paper at Roy Boyd memorialize visits he made to Virginia when his brother was dying of cancer. Frerichs would bike with his seven-year-old nephew down to the Potomac River, where they’d find shells, seeds, and pods. Frerichs suggested drawing their specimens, which they did together. Chestnut 14 is a large-scale drawing of a chestnut he found–actually three rotated views of the same chestnut superimposed on one another. This schematic approach, which requires the viewer to mentally assemble the sphere, distances the work from realistic drawings and overly pretty nature paintings. “Realistic representation implies an objectivity,” he says, “and creates a separation between viewer and object.” For the “Potomac River Metastasis” series, represented by four works here, he collaged torn paper onto drawings of seeds.
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Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Fred Camper.