MERIDITH PINGREE - MOLTEN SPROUTS (Main Gallery) DANIAL NORD - FATE MACHINE (Lower Level) Exhibition Dates: January 25 - February 23, 2008 Opening Reception: Friday, January 25 from 6 - 9 PM To kick off year three, Fringe will be launching its newest project the FRINGE FILES. A collection of works on paper, drawing, painting, collage, photography and digital art by west coast and pacific rim, emerging and established artists. Intended as a visual resource for curators and collectors, each month one artist will be selected as artist of the month from the files and have work featured in the rear main gallery. Molten Sprouts features kinetic sculptures and related drawings by Meridith Pingree. The artist physically tracks human behavior and traffic patterns utilizing quasi-scientific, homespun, reactive sculptures. Sensors pick up on people's energy and movement throughout the gallery; her work exists as amplifications of this subtle energy, creating unconventional, complex portraits of people and spaces. Sourcing dreams, magic, plant life, robotics, geometry, and textile design, she amalgamates these into amoebic creatures. The Yellow Star hanging central in the gallery feeds off ambient energy. The transparent ring mutates its shape, expanding, and contracting in slow jarring movements using motion sensors coupled with small motors. Within other works, kinetic links of a centipede-like creature respond individually to create a live mutating curve; toys, car parts, zipper tape, and plastic spider rings connect with their own rhythm into geometric textiles making up the bodies of the microbe-like critters. The two, three, and four-dimensional pieces exist together, not unlike a more typical ecosystem.The sculptures can see themselves. Something like an ice crystal or a virus, they move and grow falling into complex patterns of movement responding to each other, questioning social interaction, meanings of time, and what it is when we consider something to be alive. Meridith Pingree is a New York based artist known for her quirky reactive sculptures. She is a graduate of Skowhegan and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been shown at the Bronx Museum, Smack Mellon, Triple Candie, James Nicholson Gallery, The Soap Factory, and BravinLee Programs among others. She has an upcoming show at Museo Antropológico y de Arte Contemporáneo in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and a solo show at the gallery at Sarah Lawrence College and was recently nominated for a Rockefeller New Media Fellowship. For more information visit her website: http://meridithpingree.com Fate Machine is a video installation by Danial Nord. The artist escalates his critique of the impacts of techno-consumerism; the work emphasizes peripheral issues of disposability and accountability within the rapid cycles of electronic obsolescence. Giant mechanical shredders pulverize piles of discarded computer components, writhing as they tumble to their disintegration as e-debris, spit onto conveyor belts to be taken somewhere else. In processing the underlying anxiety of consumer culture, the artist creates an oddly beautiful albeit violent spectacle. Nord questions an epidemic of disengagement by presenting a challenging subject through the distancing lens of electronic media. Danial Nord lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his BFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. Subsequently, he studied Technology and Media at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the New York University's Center for Digital Multimedia, and at the Silicon Studio in Santa Monica. Nord an award winning media designer and environmental activist, has been in numerous exhibitions in California, New York, Oregon and New Mexico, and is currently developing an installation for the California Museum of Photography in Riverside. His unconventional location-specific interventions have also appeared in grocery stores, motel rooms, and public restrooms on both coasts.