Anna Frlan: Interbellum III
Ottawa school of Art Gallery
January 10—February 22, 2013

Anna Frlan uses nothing but steel in her art making. The infinite possibilities of steel’s liquid state keep drawing her back to the welding machine. To her, the magic of manipulating the flowing red hot metal more than compensates for the practical problems that the medium creates, such as moving the heavy, complex assemblages she builds, consisting of a myriad of pieces that can be as large as twelve by five feet. For a sculptor like Frlan, working with malleable metal is like touching a material life-force that flows within all living and non-living matter.

As Deleuze and Guattari famously observed: “Even the waters, the grasses’ varieties of wood and, the animals are populated by salts or mineral elements. Not everything is metal, but metal is everywhere.” ¹ The societal uses of steel are nonetheless far from sacrosanct; in wartime in particular, metal becomes a precious commodity. Frlan, who was born in Canada, has never known war, but as the daughter of Croatian émigrés who experienced years of war she’s heard their stories and imagined the horror. In her work, she began focusing her attention on the material traces that are reminders of war’s violence, such as crutches, air-raid sirens and unexploded bombs and grenades. Painstakingly welding fanciful facsimiles of such militaristic artefacts in steel, Frlan created a series of exhibitions, Interbellum I, II and III— all shown in

…