2018
Interior Resonances
July 13 – August 25, 2023
Monday – Friday, 11am – 6pm
Opening Reception: Thursday, July 13, 6-8pm
Curated by Regine Basha
Heather Dewey-Hagborg Jacob Kirkegaard
Tamar Ettun Nate Lewis
Alina Grasmann Dindga McCannon
Milford Graves Daniel Neumann
Yvette Janine Jackson Aura Satz
Remy Jungerman Kazumi Tanaka
Nina Katchadourian Pascale Marthine Tayou
Dana Kavelina Jan Tichy
Victoria Keddie Summer Wheat
EVENTS
Wednesday, July 26, 5pm
Exhibition Walkthrough
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It has been 10 years since the first show at Fridman Gallery. From the beginning, the gallery aimed to show emerging artists working in painting, sculpture and installation, often giving the artists space to create new work and experiment and guest curators room to explore ideas. The gallery saw the value of giving artists free reign of the space, including setting aside time between the exhibitions to allow for live music, experimental performance, dance and other interdisciplinary works. Serial programs emerged and took root such as the annual New Ear Festival showcasing some of New York’s most exciting experimental performers every January, and, more recently, Radial – electronic music as an art form, and Morir Soñando, a series pairing electro-acoustic musicians with free-improv instrumentalists.
With all this fullness, the 10th anniversary show will consist of three distinct but related parts:
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Interior Resonances, an exhibition of sculptures, prints, and paintings in the gallery’s main space, curated by Regine Basha.
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CT::SWaM’s Plasticity Office in the gallery’s showroom, designed by sound engineer, artist and curator Daniel Neumann.
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A microcinema in the gallery’s downstairs media room featuring an ongoing montage of past performances and interviews, and a weekly screening series.
Aura Satz, Tuning Fork Spell 18, 2020-22
Main Gallery:
The group exhibition Interior Resonances brings together a selection of works from the current Fridman Gallery roster as well as from many of the seminal shows and performances that took place during the gallery’s early days on Spring street and its current location on the Bowery. Curated by Regine Basha, an early advisor of the gallery, the works in the group exhibition will reflect a plutonian mood, meaning the tendency to dwell in an interior realm, while processing distant memories, wrestling with inner demons, and transmuting these into material forms. The practice of inner work, otherwise known as ‘spirit work’ or ‘shadow work’, foregrounds looking inward to reflect fearlessly into the depths of subconscious activity and to reckon with often existential questions about what we are really made of beneath the surface of the skin. Beyond gazing inward, this work also calls for the actual task of carving out space for, listening deeply to, and manifesting specific forms or talismans of these inner forces, as did the early forebears of this, the Surrealists.
Nate Lewis is recognized for his intricate works on paper, which combine elements of photography, printmaking, sculpture and drawing, creating patterns and textures akin to cellular tissue and topography.
Lewis has had two solo shows with Fridman Gallery: Latent Tapestries (2020) and Tuning the Current (2022).
Nate Lewis, Signaling XXX, 2020, hand-sculpted inkjet print, ink, graphite, frottage, 40 x 26"
Summer Wheat creates unique “paint tapestries” by pushing acrylic paint through the back and onto the front of wire-mesh screens. Inspired by intimate and cosmic space, her tactile, vivid, layered, non-linear compositions offer alternative versions of history, mythology, and folklore.
Wheat’s debut solo exhibition in New York, Walk-In Pantry, took place at Fridman Gallery in 2015.
Summer Wheat, Pot of Gold, 2015, acrylic on aluminum mesh, 72 x 48"
Pascale Marthine Tayou, Poupée Pascale #20, 2014
Crystal and mixed media, 23.23 x 9.84 x 11.42"
Dana Kavelina, We Are All Tied Now, 2019, graphite and colored pencil on paper, 11.5 x 11.5"
Milford Graves, Plant/Body Chart
Pascale Marine Thayou’s Poupées (or dolls), small figurative sculptures fashioned from crystal and mixed materials. These are wonderfully hybrid sculptures, fusing European and African elements. Crystal connects with the long history of glassmaking (as well as issues of class) in Europe, while the mixed materials and the look of these sculptures connect with different kinds of African sculptures. Marthine Tayou was featured in Flair, a group sculpture exhibition that took place at Fridman Gallery in 2017.
Dana Kavelina's works address military violence, historical and individual trauma, and memory. Kavelina has participated in the widely acclaimed group exhibition of twelve women artists from Ukraine responding to the ongoing war, Women At War (2022)
Milford Graves was a visual artist, drummer, healer, computer programmer, martial artist, and professor of music. His spirit defined the sounds of free jazz, a musical style that became a symbol of Black empowerment. Graves’ artworks combine the various elements of his genre-bending practice: sculptures, drawings and paintings of energy flows connecting body and mind, often incorporating musical instruments and anatomical studies. Graves first and only gallery show, Heart Harmonics: sound, energy, and natural healing phenomena, took place at Fridman Gallery in 2021, three months after his passing.
Kazumi Tanaka, Harmony, 2021, deer skull fragments. mother of pearl, metal string, brass, old piano key
Two String Bass: 10 ½ x 3 ¼ x 2 ¼"
Harmonica: 1 ¾ x 2 ½ x 2 ½"
Kazumi Tanaka's Harmony was created from found animal skulls in the woods and slowly transformed them into functional musical instruments, thereby producing new sounds and meaning which continue beyond the animal’s death. Tanaka’s first solo exhibition with Fridman Gallery, Beyond Silence, took place at the gallery’s Beacon location in 2022.
Dindga McCannon, Sister Alone With Her Spirits, Printed 2020, design 1972, ethcing, 15.5 x 18"
Remy Jungerman, Pimba AGIDA BAAU IV, 2020, cotton textile, kaolin, on wood panel (mdf), 10 x 10"
Dindga McCannon's mixed-media paintings, quilts, and works on paper focus on the stories of women: iconic public figures, unknown heroines, family, and friends from Harlem. McCannon’s first-ever solo exhibition (after fifty five years of omission from the mainstream art world), In Plain Sight, took place at Fridman Gallery in 2021
Remy Jungerman explores the intersection of pattern and symbol in Surinamese Maroon culture and 20th Century Modernism. Utilizing West-African geometric textiles, kaolin clay, and handmade, syncopated grids, he brings seemingly disparate visual languages into conversation, and challenges the established art historical canon. Jungerman’s first large-scale exhibition in New York, Brilliant Corners, took place at Fridman Gallery in 2021.
Media Room:
Memorable performances and interviews from Fridman Gallery’s New Ear Festival, 9 Evenings + 50, etc., featuring Pauline Oliveros, Brandon Lopez, Alvin Lucier, Helado Negro, and others.
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Friday microcinema featuring all-day screenings revisiting seminal video and sound works from the gallery’s program:
July 14: Heather Dewey-Hagborg, T3511 (2018)
July 21: Milford Graves Full Mantis (2018), directed by Jake Meginsky
July 28: Yvette Janine Jackson, Destination Freedom (2017)
August 4: Nina Katchadourian, The Recarcassing Ceremony (2016)
August 11: Victoria Keddie, Cannibal Mécanique (2017)
August 18: Nate Lewis, a parable about dancing with landscapes (2022)
August 25: Aura Satz, The Listening Cobweb (2021)
Tamar Ettun, How to Trap a Demon (2023)
The CT::SWaM Plasticity Office is a sound installation and temporary spatial sound studio inside Fridman Gallery’s office/showroom, designed by sound engineer/artist Daniel Neumann. The installation-system will feature a rotation of performers who will be activating it as a space for events, presentations, workshops, experiments, talks, discussions, etc. The recordings of these activations will get integrated into the regular, daytime installation as added content, which will accumulate and change over the run of the show.
