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:
Interior Resonances, an exhibition of sculptures, prints, and paintings in the gallery’s main space, curated by Regine Basha.
CT::SWaM’s Plasticity Office in the gallery’s showroom, designed by sound engineer, artist and curator Daniel Neumann.
A microcinema in the gallery’s downstairs media room featuring an ongoing montage of past performances and interviews, and a weekly screening series.
Pascale Marthine Tayou, Poupée Pascale #20, 2014, Crystal and mixed media, 23.23 x 9.84 x 11.42″
In the 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.
Participating artists:
In the 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.
Plus 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)
In the Showroom ~ 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.
Guest Performers: Juan Betancurth, Kayla Cashetta, Seth Cluett, Erik DeLuca, Johann Diedrick, Dani Dobkin, Richard Garet, Lee Gilboa, Max Glenn, Barbara Held, Kenneth Kirschner, C Lavender, Lester St. Louis, Joshua Ott, Anna Roberts-Gevalt, DMR, Rachel D.W. Rome, Michael J. Schumacher, Suzanne Thorpe, Lauren Tosswill, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, and more.
Interior Resonances, curated by Regine Basha, will be on view from July 13 to August 25, 2023 at Fridman Gallery, 169 Bowery, NYC. An Opening Reception will be held on Thursday, July 13th from 6-8pm.