Juliana Frick

= Division III =

''This article is part of a Climax Div III Issue. By Alejandra Cuellar, Staff Writer.''



Juliana Frick's performance Apples and Whales began with the violent rupture of a green apple into two equal sides, one side containing a sleeping boy and the other an attentive girl. The show moved forward in three sections with an impressive group of musicians, who sometimes stood in the four corners of the room creating an acoustic surround sound, a narration of three different characters, and video footage projected on a hanging translucent sheet.

Juliana’s creative process is clearly reflected in the performance. The fragmented time she lived through while experiencing loss served as the driving force behind the construction of Apples and Whales. From an exposure to mixed media in her first year at Hampshire, Juliana realized the possibilities in defying the standard forms of composition. She found expression through these different forms of art as complementary to her different ideas about loss and division. “It can be any division,” she said. An audience can understand it as any rupture that occurs in human experience, but for her, the division happened first between two sides of her person—the artistic and the hyper analytical selves. It is also the division between memory and fantasy, and the ways these merge together. Juliana constructed the show based on dreams and daytime hallucinations, or rather the moments in waking life that spoke to her in some way. The more she worked on her show, the more she understood the meanings of these fragments of her life. At the end of the show the two broken sides are sewn together in reconciliation with a needle and a red thread, a reminder of that initial rupture that cannot be forgotten.