FRIDMAN GALLERY

Fridman Gallery is pleased to present the opening of They Sicken of the Calm Who Know the Storm on Thursday, January 16, 6-9pm. Curated by Maureen Sullivan, this group exhibition with Greta Alfaro, Julia Chiang, James Clar, Richard Garet, Pryce Lee, Naama Tsabar and Dustin Yellin, features video, sculpture and installation that emanate beautiful danger - living life to the extreme; broken dreams and endless cycles of incurable hope and pain; things that are slick, seductive, stifled and pulsating with a palpable energy. 

 

Richard Garet’s electrified color-rich moving image works, created through sound then silenced, cannot be stifled and throb with an intense energy.  Julia Chiang’s white ceramic chains, made all the more implausible by their handmade fragility, triumph beauty over function and challenge ideas of desire, connectivity and confinement.  James Clar’s alarm clock, trapped in an airtight vacuum chamber, can be seen shaking and screaming Wake UP! but never heard; thereby, rendering impotent the technology that attempts to control our desires. Similarly, Dustin Yellin’s explosive and collapsed illusions are suspended, dissected and trapped forever in sliced layers of resin.

 

Greta Alfaro’s films lure one in with their serenity. But the underlying anxiety, created mostly by our own challenges with stillness and yearning for action, is soon realized in a frenzied gluttony, leaving only the remains of the day in their wake. Naama Tsabar plays with signifiers of danger and enjoyment, boundaries and borders, temptation and destruction. Here white bed sheets – the material of dreaming, escape ladders, and Molotov cocktails – slowly absorb trickling fluids from bottles of alcohol creating a disorienting multisensory – and potentially combustible experience.  And Pryce Lee shows in NY for the first time with a new 9-piece shattered mirror work created specifically about an incident in the city – the 2012 Empire State Building shooting. Capturing the randomness, violence and fragility of life for the innocent bystander, Lee’s work reflects us – destroyed and whole.

 

As Dorothy Parker wrote (and inspired the title for the exhibition):

 

…this no sea of mine, that humbly laves 

Untroubled sands, spread glittering and warm.

I have a need of wilder, crueler waves; 

They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.

 

Dorothy Parker, Fair Weather, from Sunset Gun Poems, 1928

​

​

press release pdf