A Dream and a Drive

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Frid-Jimenez' Ekstase (2019) installed as a double-sided video projection in the center of the gallery.

Frid-Jimenez' After Dark (2019), LED panels, microcontroller, custom software

A Dream and a Drive (2019)

A Dream and a Drive, was a two person exhibition of new work by Amber Frid-Jimenez and Kathy Slade at Mónica Reyes Gallery in Vancouver, British Columbia.

The exhibition includes video and embroidery that draw on sources ranging from Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary (1856) to Ekstase, a 1933 film starring Hedy Lamarr and directed by Gustav Machatý.

Both historical works were deemed obscene by the censors of their time. Emma Bovary’s scandalous conduct, her desire, adulterous liaisons, and suicide, led Flaubert to trial where he was charged with offenses against public and religious morals; while Lamarr’s performance of Eva Hermann’s sexual desire—notoriously, the first portrayal of a female orgasm in the history of film—led to charges of indecency from various countries in Europe and North America that amounted to years of delay for the release of Ekstase.

The exhibition focuses on the circle or typographic figure O. The O manifests in a new series of embroidered monochromes by Slade. It is present in Hedy Lamarr’s embodiment of ecstasy in Frid-Jimenez’s remake of an excerpt of Ekstaseand exists within a fictitious journey around the streets of Rouen as imagined by Flaubert. This exhibition marks the beginning of a new collaborative project for Frid-Jimenez and Slade that will study how images are read through persuasive texts and technologies and how meaning is formed through modes of reimagining, repetition, and reenactment.