| For the last 20 years,
Terri Friedman has examined the dilemma of water as a hybrid art
form that explores an impoverished yet complex biology, ecology, and
kinetics. In her past kinetic sculptures, colored water moving
or psychodelic inflatable sculptures became both paintings in perpetual
motion and breathing bodies. She recently completed a year
long project for Johns Hopkins new Bloomberg Children’s Hospital
in Baltimore (2012) where she was asked to create large scale paintings
on Plexiglas that responded to Children’s books. Her landscape
derived works, which were also featured in a solo shows at Patricia
Sweetow Gallery (2011) in San Francisco and at Shoshana Wayne
Gallery in Santa Monica (2007), capture the fluidity, transparency,
and reflection of water with paint while addressing the overwhelming
and unpredictable power of water to both support and destroy life. Her
projects, while deeply connected to environmental issues of land
and water, are more poetic than political. Like many artists
today, her work is interdisciplinary: questioning the artificial
boundaries between painting and sculpture, temporal and permanent,
artificial and natural, abstract and representational, heroic and
humble.
As Chris Miles wrote in his review of her solo show in Artforum:
“Unabashedly
Pop and decorative, Friedman’s paintings are nonetheless far from landscape
lite. Rather, they are elegant meditations on a world in which our awareness
of nature’s movements, once compreheded in glacial time and cyclical
predictability, has itself become more fluid. “
Her paintings and kinetic sculptures have been exhibited nationally
as well as internationally including the Orange County Museum of
Art Biennial, Newport Harbor Museum of Art, Santa Monica Museum
of Art, Geffen Contemporary (Los Angeles), L.A.C.E., San Jose Museum
of Art, Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, W139 Amsterdam,
The Icebox Athens, c/o Gallery Oslo and numerous other venues.
Her work has been featured in such periodicals as Art in America,
Artforum, Los Angeles Times, World Art, and Art and Text.
She resides with her family in El Cerrito, California and teaches
at the California College of the Arts in Oakland, California. |