WET
“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 comprehended in glacial time and cyclical predictability, has itself become more fluid.”
- Christopher Miles, ArtForum Magazine, October 2007
For the last 20 years my work has examined the dilemma of water as a hybrid art form that explores an impoverished yet complex biology and kinetics. In past kinetic sculptures, colored water moving becomes painting in perpetual motion, biology, the breath. My landscape derived works, 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.
Bodies of water, from chlorinated pools to raging waves. filter through my dreams and thoughts. Liquid, buoyant, transparent, distorted, fetal, dangerous, uncontrollable, and Technicolor. My body, which is primarily composed of water, craves contact with water. I drink. I soak. I swim. I pee. Emotions have a watery quality as do states of being, like joy or insanity. Beyond emotions, psychology, and dreams, the politics of water permeate our cells and our communities.
Dehydration is death. My ‘body’ without water and air contracts and dies. Aging and disease deform and dehydrate. Gravity nags
“A being dedicated to water is a being in flux. He dies every minute; something of his substance is constantly falling away...Water always flows, always falls, always ends in horizontal death.”
-Gaston Bachelard (Water and Dreams: An Essay of the Imagination of Matter)