Artist
Inga McCaslin Frick
“My entry into the art world began in 1979, when I slipped from the physics department to the art department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I love science but I am also drawn to the subjective realm that is beyond the purview of science. Though I changed disciplines, my interest in science has remained a throughline in my work and the tension between objective and subjective experience is an enduring concern.
It was in the spirit of inquiry and research that I began my first cohesive body of original work in New York City in 1987, shortly after graduating with an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. That work was inspired by a graduate seminar on Cubism taught by the art historian Leo Steinberg. In the mode of phenomenological investigation, I set out to document my moment-to-moment experience of space—visually, viscerally, and intuitively. I often listened to music while painting, and those rhythms and textures became unconsciously entwined with the work. I imagined myself “playing” the brushes in a jazz ensemble. That interplay between space and musicality has remained a defining thread in my practice.
In 1989 I got married and moved to Washington DC. I had a solo show in 1990 at the Middendorf Gallery, Washington’s foremost gallery at the time. Work from this period was included in the Corcoran Biennial of American Painting in 1994—a great honor and an affirmation.
In 1995, my path took a turn when I returned to graduate school to pursue a second MFA, this time in digital art. The shift gave me a new toolkit to explore the same questions with different means. For several years, I worked primarily in video installation in collaboration with my friend Gillian Brown, whose interests in science echoed my own. Our work together culminated in a Bunting Fellowship at Harvard in 1999—a year spent working alongside 38 other women scholars at the Radcliffe Institute. It was both a privilege and a joy.
As I went on to teach digital art at Stetson University in Deland Florida, I continued exploring video but gradually found my way back to painting —now with the computer as part of my palette. The intersection of the physical realm of materials and the phantasmagoric domain of digital manipulation became a fertile ground.. This blurry terrain—the shifting boundary between real and virtual, material and ephemeral—became central to my practice. It is in this intersection that my fascination with illusion began to take root. Using digital tools to confound and extend traditional media, I found ways to combine physical materials with their virtual counterparts—collapsing distinctions, creating visual ambiguity, and evoking the complexity of my lived experience. My recent work embraces illusion fully, including illusion of space and light, so often eschewed by the abstract expressionists with whom I otherwise feel a kinship. This muddling of reality and imagination feels resonant with our very strange times.
I continued to work with these ideas during a long period in which caregiving responsibilities took me out of the formal art world. My artmaking persisted quietly and privately. In 2020, during the first year of the COVID pandemic, my much loved mother passed away at age 98. Soon after, I returned to full-time studio practice.
Today, I live and work in Guerneville, California. My recent work continues to explore illusion, rhythm, space, and the layered poetics of perception.”
Read more about Inga McCaslin Frick and find her work here: https://www.ingamccaslin.com/