NEW YORK, NY.- 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 took root such as the annual New Ear Festival showcasing some of New York’s most exciting experimental performers.
The exhibition Interior Resonances brings together a selection of works from the current 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 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.
With all this fullness, the 10th anniversary show consists of three distinct but related parts:
● an exhibition of sculptures, prints, and paintings in the gallery’s main space;
● CT::SWaM’s Plasticity Office, a sound installation in the gallery’s showroom; and
● a microcinema in the gallery’s media room featuring past performances and video screenings.
Friday microcinema features 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) and Tamar Ettun, How to Trap a Demon (2023)
This presentation profiles only some of the artists who have been integral to the gallery’s history.
Regine Basha
Curator Regine Basha has participated in Fridman Gallery’s programming throughout its ten-year history, curating Sense Objects (2014), 9 Evenings + 50 (2016), and All at Once (2021).
Regine Basha has worked for over 20 years curating exhibitions and public programs nationally and internationally in a variety of public institutions, public spaces, galleries and museums, developing a specific expertise in the work of sound installation artists as well as art coming from the MENA region and its diaspora. Her exhibitions have been funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation, Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation and the NEA, and have been reviewed by the New York Times, Artforum and The Wire. https://bashaprojects.com/
Heather Dewey-Hagborg
Heather Dewey-Hagborg has had two solo exhibitions with Fridman Gallery: A Becoming Resemblance (2017) and At the Temperature of My Body (2019). Her third solo exhibition with the gallery will open in November of 2023.
Stranger Visions (2012-13) consists of seven, 3D printed portraits rendered from anonymous DNA samples collected from the streets, public bathrooms and waiting rooms of New York City.
T3511 (2018) is a genomic detective story and biological romance. The four-channel video installation follows the artist who falls in love with an anonymous saliva donor as she profiles their DNA.
Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s work has been exhibited at numerous museums worldwide and is held in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Wellcome Collection, and the New-York Historical Society.
Alina Grasmann
Alina Grasmann has had three solo exhibitions with Fridman Gallery: Edge of Eden (2018), Sculpting in Time (2020), and The Grand Buffet (2022). The gallery will present the second installment of The Grand Buffet series, based on the history and the interiors of a modernist landmark in Saxony, Haus Schminke, at the house itself in September of 2023.
Grasmann’s paintings superimpose real places and imagined ones, blurring fact and fiction. Scenes appear on canvas cinematically, opening up a space for stories that play out as if in a continuous loop.
Alina Grasmann graduated with top honors from the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, having previously studied at the Vienna University of Applied Arts. Grasmann’s work has been exhibited at several museums in Germany, including Kunstverein München, Galerie der Künstler, and Hubert Burda Media.), 2021 Oil on canvas, 10 x 14”
Tamar Ettun
Tamar Ettun has had two solo exhibitions with Fridman Gallery: Alula in Blue (2015) and Eat a Pink Owl (2017).
Ettun uses textile, sculpture, and performance to examine somatic empathy, trauma-healing modalities, and ritual. How to Trap A Demon is a multidisciplinary work conjuring the aerial spirit demon, Lilit (Lilith), whose story traces back to ancient Sumerian, Akkadian, and Judaic mythology. Ettun revives the healing rituals by creating demon traps of various scales and materials — clay, iron, textiles, in performance and video.
Tamar Ettun has had exhibitions and performances at The Chinati Foundation, Pioneer Works, The Watermill Center, Art Omi Sculpture Garden, PERFORMA, The Barrick Museum, Uppsala Museum of Art, Bryant Park, Sculpture Center, Madison Square Park, Socrates Sculpture Park, Indianapolis Museum of Art, and The Jewish Museum, among others.
Milford Graves
Milford 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. The gallery then presented his historical works at Art Basel Miami Beach 2022, and will present his more recent multimedia sculptures at The Armory Show in September 2023.
Graves’ Yara Videos (1992) provide an archival and intimate view of the martial art Graves invented, a form that draws upon the movements of the praying mantis. Yara is a Yoruba word that means to be nimble or flexible. Yara is composed basically of West African dance movement. Warrior movement.
Milford Graves: Full Mantis (2018) is a feature-length portrait of the artist, directed by one of his disciples, Jake Meginsky.
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. He is the subject of a traveling museum retrospective The Mind-Body Deal, which has been presented at ICA Philadelphia, Artists Space and ICA Los Angeles.
Yvette Janine Jackson
Yvette Janine Jackson has performed several of her Radio Operas at Fridman Gallery and released a record, Freedom, on the gallery’s vinyl imprint in 2020.
Jackson's radio opera Destination Freedom is presented here as an 8-channel sound installation. It takes the listener inside the cargo hold of a tall ship transporting Africans to the Americas. The work was derived from Jackson’s research into the oral histories of those born into slavery and unfolds in three intertwined scenes: the cargo hold of a tall ship transporting Africans to the Americas; a disorienting journey that traverses time; and the arrival into the weightlessness of outer space.
Yvette Janine Jackson is a composer of electroacoustic, chamber, and orchestral musics for concert, theatre, and installation. Building on her experience as a theatrical sound designer, she blends various forms into her own aesthetic of narrative soundscape composition, radio opera, and improvisation. Her works often draw from history to examine relevant social issues. Jackson studied music at the RD Colburn School of Performing Arts in Los Angeles, holds a B.A. in Music from Columbia University in the City of New York, and a Ph.D. in Music-Integrative Studies from the University of California, San Diego. Her research focuses on the history of production techniques and aesthetics which link radio drama and electroacoustic musics; multichannel composition; and immersion.
Remy Jungerman
Remy Jungerman’s first large-scale exhibition in New York, Brilliant Corners, took place at Fridman Gallery in 2021.
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.
Remy Jungerman represented the Netherlands in the 2019 Venice Biennale, and is the recipient of the prestigious Heineken prize for arts and sciences. In 2021-22 he was the subject of a mid-career retrospective at The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
Jacob Kirkegaard
Jacob Kirkegaard’s has had two solo exhibitions with Fridman Gallery: VOID (2018) and Testimonium (2021).
Kirkegaard records acoustic and visual properties of carefully selected environments to generate spatial installations, sound sculpture and photography. Kirkegaard's Black Metal Square #1 consists of three freely hanging black metal plates of different sizes whose subtle natural vibrations are amplified and played back into themselves, evoking their resonant frequencies.
Jacob Kirkegaard has exhibited at numerous institutions throughout the world, including MoMA, The Hood Museum, LOUISIANA, ARoS, KW, The Menil Collection, Rothko Chapel, Aichi Triennale, and Mori Art Museum. His work is in the collections of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, ARoS Aarhus Art Museum in Denmark, and Bell Gallery at Brown University, USA.
Nina Katchadourian
Nina Katchadourian’s first solo exhibition in New York, Ification, took place at Fridman Gallery in 2019.
Building on the artist’s ongoing exploration of humor as an art form, Katchadourian’s The Recarcassing Ceremony (2016) tells the story of an elaborate game Katchadourian and her younger brother played as children. The game involved two families of Playmobil figures. After a tragic event befell two of the characters, the siblings invented a “recarcassing ceremony” to bring the characters back to life.
Nina Katchadourian is an interdisciplinary artist whose work includes video, performance, sound, sculpture, photography, and public projects. Katchadourian's work is in numerous public and private collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Blanton Museum of Art, Morgan Library, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Margulies Collection, and Saatchi Gallery.
Dana Kavelina
Dana Kavelina has participated in the widely acclaimed group exhibition of twelve women artists from Ukraine responding to the ongoing war, Women At War (2022). Curated by Monika Fabijanska, the show has traveled from Fridman Gallery to university museums nationwide.
The work engulfs the viewer in a sort of minor-key visual cadenza that sounds the heart and very soul of a nation that has come to awareness of itself—past, present, unknowable future—under unspeakable conditions. – Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, July 18, 2022
Dana Kavelina works address military violence, historical and individual trauma, and memory.
Kavelina's video-poem Letter to a Turtle Dove (2020) was recently acquired by MoMA and is currently on view in Signals: How Video Transformed the World. She is the winner of the 2023 PinchukArtCentre Prize, and will exhibit at the 2024 Venice Biennale.
Victoria Keddie
Victoria Keddie has exhibited and performed at Fridman Gallery throughout its ten-year history.
Victoria Keddie’s Cannibal Mécanique (2017) is a live experience incorporating analog modular sound composition, live broadcast video and the designed movement of camera man, camera, the performing body. The piece involves 6 manned camera stations w CRT monitors for individual signal feed, 2 movement performers, 1 large projection of live camera mix, an analog switch / mixing console, and recorded sound playback on vinyl (side A/B as part 1/2) is to be performed and mixed live for a present audience.
Victoria Keddie is an artist working in varying media and broadcast. Keddie’s work explores electromagnetic systems, media ecologies, and the machinic body. Keddie's work has been exhibited and performed at numerous venues in the United States and internationally, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of the Moving Image, and the Museum of Modern Art.
Nate Lewis
Nate Lewis has had two solo shows with Fridman Gallery: Latent Tapestries (2020) and Tuning the Current (2022).
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’s second video work, a parable about dancing with landscapes (2022), mixes photographic snapshots of a dancer in motion, medical diagnostic imagery, weather patterns, atmospheric and oceanic currents, and starling murmurations. Lewis contrasts this contemplative unfurling of movement with distorted, blurred images that entreat the viewer to consider language clarity and obfuscation.
Nate Lewis earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Nursing from Virginia Commonwealth University, and practiced critical-care nursing for nine years. Lewis’s work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, the Brooklyn Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Wellin Museum of Art, the Blanton Museum of Art, Grinnell College Museum of Art, Kadist Foundation, and numerous other public and private collections.
Dindga McCannon
Dindga 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. The gallery then presented her historical works at Art Basel Miami Beach 2021, and will present a solo presentation by the artist at Independent 20th Century in September 2023.
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.
Dindga McCannon’s work is in the public collections of The National Gallery of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Hirshhorn Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, The Phillips Collection, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, among others.
She has participated in major traveling museum exhibitions, including Afro-Atlantic Histories at the National Gallery of Art, We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-1985 at the Brooklyn Museum; and Black Power at the National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, TN.
Daniel Neumann / CT::SWaM’s Plasticity Office
Daniel Neumann has organized performances and exhibited at Fridman Gallery from its founding until the present day, including: One Cycle Ahead (2015), 9 Evenings + 50 (2016), Channels (2018), 5th Anniversary Festival (2018), and SOLOS (2021).
The CT::SWaM Plasticity Office is a sound installation and temporary spatial sound studio inside Fridman Gallery’s office/showroom. The installation-system features a rotation of performers who are activating it as a space for events, presentations, workshops, experiments, talks, discussions, etc. The recordings of these activations are then integrated into the regular, daytime installation as added content, which 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.
Daniel Neumann is a Brooklyn-based sound artist, organizer and audio engineer. He holds a master's degree in media art from the Academy of Visual Art Leipzig. His artistic practice uses conceptual and often collaborative strategies to explore sound, sound material and its modulation through space, situation and media. As a curator, he runs an event series in NYC and Berlin (CT::SWaM) that engages in spatial sound works and focused listening. http://danielneumann.org/
Aura Satz
Aura Satz has had two solo exhibitions with Fridman Gallery: Her Marks, A Measure (2016) and Listen, Recalibrate (2018).
Aura Satz’s The Listening Cobweb (2021) continues her ongoing portraits of listening with percussionist Evelyn Glennie. Glennie has been profoundly deaf since the age of 12 and has taught herself to hear with parts of her body other than her ears.
Aura Satz works in film, sound, performance and sculpture, in order to conceptualize a distributed, expanded and shared notion of voice. She explores various sound technologies, and ways in which these might resist standardization, generating new soundscapes, and in turn new forms of listening.
She has performed, exhibited and screened her work at Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, Sydney Biennale, The Museum of Modern Art, Sharjah Art Foundation, the Wellcome Collection, and Dallas Contemporary, among others. Her works are in the collections of The National Portrait Gallery and Kadist Foundation.
Kazumi Tanaka
Kazumi Tanaka’s first solo exhibition with Fridman Gallery, Beyond Silence, took place at the gallery’s Beacon location in 2022.
To make Harmony (2021), Tanaka 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.
Kazumi Tanaka makes intricate works that are meditations on memory and loss. Her work has been included in numerous museum exhibitions, including the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA, The Miyauchi Art Foundation, Hiroshima, Japan; Neues Museum, Salem, Germany; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA.
Pascale Marthine Tayou
Pascale Marthine Tayou was featured in Flair, a group sculpture exhibition that took place at Fridman Gallery in 2017.
Pascale Marthine Tayou (Cameroon/Belgium) has exhibited extensively, including his
show-stopping African village/world, made from sundry local materials, in the Arsenale at the 2009 Venice Biennale, and his 2015 solo show at the Serpentine Galleries in London. For Flair, Tayou exhibited three of his 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. Each of Tayou’s Poupées has personality, drama, an almost talismanic force.
Jan Tichy
Jan Tichy has had four exhibitions with Fridman Gallery: Light³ (2014), Long Lines (2016), Light Shop (2020), Infra Structures (2023).
Tichy’s Installations continues his investigation and experiments with light as material. The series consists of 40 photo etchings, one print per site-specific time-based light installation. While basing the etchings on photographs documenting his ongoing spatial installation practice, Tichy has sought to move from the photographic medium to engraving and printing in order to rediscover light – this time outside of space – and to reveal a new range of shades and qualities of concentration and dispersion.
Born in Prague in 1974, Jan Tichy earned his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is now Associate Professor in the Departments of Photography and Art & Technology Studies. Tichy has had solo exhibitions at the MCA Chicago; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; CCA Tel Aviv; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; and the Chicago Cultural Center; among others. His works are included in public collections of MoMA in New York, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Magasin 3 Stockholm Kunsthal, Museum of Applied Arts (Frankfurt), Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), among others.
Summer Wheat
Summer Wheat’s debut solo exhibition in New York, Walk-In Pantry, took place at Fridman Gallery in 2015.
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.
Summer Wheat has had solo exhibitions at the Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC (2021); Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO (2020); KMAC Museum, Louisville, KY (2019); Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, WA (2017); and Oklahoma Contemporary, Oklahoma City, OK (2016). Her work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Peréz Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL; The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA; The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; and the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY.
Fridman Gallery
Interior Resonances: 10th Anniversary Exhibition
Curated by Regine Basha July 13 – August 25, 2023
