Julia Friedman :: JuliaFriedman.org

Isabel Nolan at Gallery Side 2

Posted on December 23, 2010, 2:08 PM, by jfriedman, under Gallery Side 2.

Installation view with A Small Place Among Visible Things, 2010, polyethylene, jesmonite, paint, MDF, 23.5 x 31 x 25 cm

Isabel Nolan’s Tokyo debut exhibition “clocks and seasons and promises” presents a selection of her recent watercolors, drawings and small-scale sculptures. The works show Nolan’s versatility with different media: shapes that appear in the watercolors migrate into sculptures and relief installations. Yet, Nolan’s distinguishing trait is her romantic notion of personal expression that supersedes any formal amalgamation of modernist styles one can spot in her work. Even her six meter sculpture commissioned for the Dublin Airport retains the delicacy of touch that characterizes the smaller objects on view at Gallery Side 2. The show will be open through January 14th.

For more information on the artist and her work please visit her website.

Tags: drawing, Gallery Side 2, installation, Isabel Nolan, sculpture, watercolor
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“Sex Booze Weed Speed” at Rat Hole

Posted on December 23, 2010, 1:28 PM, by jfriedman, under Rat Hole Gallery.

The new Rat Hole Gallery exhibition is a two person show with a catchy title “Sex Booze Weed Speed.” The two artists, American, Paris-based Oscar Tuazon and Norwegian Gardar Eide Einarsson put together a selection of works loosely based on Minimalist and Pop Art idioms. The installation is site-specific. Tuazon and Einarsson began to collaborate following the Whitney Museum of Art’s Independent Study Program which they participated in 2001-2002. Rat Hole is preparing an eponymous publication, due out in January 2011.

Tags: Gardar Eide Einarsson, Oscar Tuazon, Rat Hole Gallery
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Myths and Habits in The Improvised City

Posted on December 19, 2010, 1:49 PM, by jfriedman, under landscape architecture.

Last Thursday Julian Worrall’s Llabo hosted a lecture by young Dutch designers Krijn Christiaansen and Kathelijne Montens. The two presented a variety of practical and whimsical projects intended to accommodate public spaces in Tokyo and surrounding areas. Unlike the overly sleek areas such as the Tokyo Midtown or Shiodome, Christiaansen and Montens’s urban landscape projections are palimpsests that incorporate the history and practical usage of public spaces. Their purpose is not to organize (and subjugate) the environment in(to) artificial constructions that conceal practicality, but to adapt spaces for real public usage. Not surprisingly, the drawings in the presentation looked more like clever child fantasies than organized and sterilized adult designs. They reminded me of Ilya Kabakov’s total installation The Boat of My Life, where he ingeniously presented his life in a shape of a giant boat subdivided into compartments, each storing bits of his protean past.

Tags: design, Ilya Kabakov, landscape architecture
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Tomoko Sawada “Mirrors”

Posted on December 14, 2010, 6:19 PM, by jfriedman, under NADiff, Tomoko Sawada.

Tomoko Sawada, Mirrors 1, 2009, Digital c-print, 4-3/8 x 7-1/16 inches

Tomoko Sawada, Mirrors 2, 2009, Digital c-print, 4-3/8 x 7-1/16 inches

Tomoko Sawada, Mirrors 16, 2009, Digital c-print, 4-3/8 x 7-1/16 inches

Tomoko Sawada, Mirrors 19, 2009, Digital c-print, 4-3/8 x 7-1/16 inches

Tomoko Sawada, Mirrors 27, 2009, Digital c-print, 4-3/8 x 7-1/16 inches

All Images Courtesy of the Gallery.

MEM gallery (now located in the NADiff complex) just closed a very interesting exhibition of Tomoko Sawada’s photographic works. Sawada, who is originally from Kobe but is now based in New York, continues her inquiry into the formative elements of one’s identity in a sequel to the 2008 series “Decoration” in which she examined the influence of street fashions on teenage identity. The latest show combines photographic imagery of a person shown “as is” with the mirror image of same person. The irregularities between the two are so subtle that the photographs initially appear to be double portraits of twins. The deceptively simple concept of the show is seconded in the minimalist appearance of the images.

Tags: MEM gallery, photography, Tomoko Sawada
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Mori Art Museum: Motohiko Odani, “Phantom Limb”

Posted on December 13, 2010, 7:17 PM, by jfriedman, under Mori Art Museum, Motohiko Odani.

“Odani Motohiko: Phantom Limb” Installation view: Mori Art Museum

2010/11/27-2011/2/27

Dying Slave: Stella

2009–10

c.500×180×220 cm

Steel, paraffin, wax

Collection of the artist

Photo: Kioku Keizo

Photo Courtesy: Mori Art Museum

“Odani Motohiko: Phantom Limb” Installation view: Mori Art Museum

2010/11/27-2011/2/27

Photo: Kioku Keizo

Photo Courtesy: Mori Art Museum

“Odani Motohiko: Phantom Limb” Installation view: Mori Art Museum

2010/11/27-2011/2/27

Photo: Kioku Keizo

Photo Courtesy: Mori Art Museum

“Odani Motohiko: Phantom Limb” Installation view: Mori Art Museum

2010/11/27-2011/2/27

Inferno

2008–10

Video installation: 8-channel synchronized HD video projection, 4.1ch sound

556×φ610 cm、5 min. 37 sec. (loop)

Collection of the artist

Sound: Takashima Kei

Production support: Stitch Co. Ltd., McRAY

Photo: Kioku Keizo

Photo Courtesy: Mori Art Museum

“Odani Motohiko: Phantom Limb” Installation view: Mori Art Museum

2010/11/27-2011/2/27

Hollow: Reversal Cradle

2009

FRP, urethane paint, mixed media

c.83.5×192×116 cm（Top）、c.101.5×192×115 cm（Bottom）

TAKAHASHI collection, Tokyo

Work created with the support of Fondation d’entreprise Hermès

Photo: Kioku Keizo

Photo Courtesy: Mori Art Museum

“Odani Motohiko: Phantom Limb” Installation view: Mori Art Museum

2010/11/27-2011/2/27

Ruffle (Dress 04)

2009–10

Wood, laser print

100×φ336 cm、53.3×78 cm（Photo）

Collection of the artist

Photo: Kioku Keizo

Photo Courtesy: Mori Art Museum

Tags: installation, Mori Art Museum, Odani Motohiko, sculpture
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Adam Parker Smith @ Galerie Sho Contemporary Art

Posted on December 13, 2010, 5:55 PM, by jfriedman, under Adam Parker Smith, Gallerie Sho Contemporary.

Red Car, 2010, oil on photograph on panel

Untitled, 2004, nylon, fiberfill, yarn, thread, plastic eyes.

Sent from my iPhone

Tags: Adam Parker Smith, Galerie Sho Contemporeary
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Openings at 3331 ARTS CYD

Posted on December 13, 2010, 5:41 PM, by jfriedman, under 3331 ARTS CYD.

Island Gallery

AA Gallery

Akibatambi 2l

3331 Project Space

Odorudake Live

Plus Eighty One

3331 Project Space

Island Gallery

Sent from my iPhone

Tags: 3331 Arts CYD
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CONTACT
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I Don't Understand with William Shatner: What makes something art?
Netflix Documentary "Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed" (2021). Directed by Joshua Rofé.
UCLA Hammer Museum: in conversation with Dave Hickey 05.11.16.
Dave Hickey & Julia Friedman from Hammer Museum on Vimeo.
Site Santa Fe: in conversation with Dave Hickey 04.15.16.
The great modernist eccentric Alexei Remizov was a “writers’ writer” whose innovative poetic prose has long since entered the Russian literary canon. Gradually expanding his working methods to make drawing an integral part of the writing process, during the 1930s and 1940s, Remizov created hundreds of albums that combined texts with collages and india ink and watercolor illustrations. (more) Northwestern University Press 7 x 10, 300 pgs, Trade Cloth ISBN 0-8101-2617-6 / $69.95
Skira Editore Milano just published a monograph on British-Iranian artist Reza Aramesh. In addition to several texts, and an interview with the artist, ACTION: BY NUMBER contains a catalogue raisonné of his work from 2002 onwards, including Aramesh’s recent marble sculpture. I discuss the art-historical genesis and cultural meaning of these spectacular and frightening works in my essay “The Meta of Marble.” (pp.124–129). SKIRA Editore Milano Hardcover. 248 pages, 153 ill., size 24x28cm ISBN 978-88-572-5285-8
Between June 2014 and April 2015, Dave Hickey posted almost 3,000 digital comments on social media, prompting nearly 700,000 words in response from art lovers, acolytes, and skeptics. Wasted Words is an unedited comprehensive transcript of these exchanges. This polyphonic digital discourse reveals the range of Hickey’s strong opinions, as he embarks on a crypto-enlightenment project for the benefit of "dunces" and "pricks." Paperback, 586 pages, 2016 ISBN-10: 1517287103
Dustbunnies is an assemblage of “swept up” fragments that came from a vast digital discourse that took place in Dave Hickey’s social media space between June 2014 and March 2015. During that time Hickey posted almost 3,000 comments, prompting nearly 700,000 words in response from art lovers, acolytes and skeptics. Wasted Words, the resulting volume, is an unedited comprehensive transcript of these exchanges. Its pendant publication, Dustbunnies, distills Hickey’s richly aphoristic comments, extracted from various discussion threads. Paperback, 124 pages, 2016 ISBN-10: 152327266X
Over the past seven years Wayne Thiebaud has made dozens of paintings, drawings, and etchings of clowns. Like much of his work, this latest series is in a sense autobiographical. During his boyhood in Long Beach he looked forward to the visits of a traveling Ringling Brothers circus and sometimes helped out behind the scenes in exchange for tickets. The costumes, faces, and antics of the clowns were the beginning of a lifelong fascination for him. The clown series is its culmination, in which the now 100-year-old artist revisits those early memories. In December 2019 Wayne Thiebaud unveiled a selection from his clown series at the San Francisco gallery founded by his son, Paul Thiebaud. The Laguna Art Museum exhibition will be a version of the Paul Thiebaud Gallery exhibition, featuring more than forty works. Fully illustrated with 56 artwork reproductions. Essay by Dr. Julia Friedman. Interview with the artist by Janet Bishop, the Thomas Weisel Family Chief Curator and Curator of Painting and Sculpture at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Hardcover: 100 pages; ISBN-10: 0578798573ISBN-13: 978-0578798578
Celebrating the 100th birthday of one of America's most respected and beloved artists, Wayne Thiebaud 100: Paintings, Prints, and Drawings honors a lifetime of extraordinary achievements across many genres. Best known for his tantalizing paintings of desserts, Thiebaud has long been affiliated with Pop Art, though his body of work is far more expansive, continuing to grow as the artist approaches his milestone birthday. Across the decades, Thiebaud has explored various details of American life through his art from urban views and rural landscapes to clowns and household items all the time continuing to explore the food subjects that made him famous. Wayne Thiebaud 100 accompanies an exhibition of the same name, organized by the Crocker Art Museum. In addition to the 100 paintings, prints, and drawings featured in the exhibition, this publication includes numerous other contextual paintings by Thiebaud, art by the masters who inspired him, and photographs of the artist with family and friends, taken over the course of his extraordinary career. Hardcover : 212 pages ISBN-10 : 1087501172 Dimensions : 9.8 x 0.9 x 11.3 inches ISBN-13 : 978-1087501178
Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev Adele Marie Barker (Editor), Eliot Borenstein (Contributor), Julia Friedman (Contributor), Adam Weiner (Contributor), Elizabeth Kristofovich Zelensky (Contributor), Robert Edelman (Contributor) With the collapse of the Soviet empire in the late 1980s, the Russian social landscape has undergone its most dramatic changes since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, turning the once bland and monolithic state-run marketplace into a virtual maze of specialty shops—from sushi bars to discotheques and tattoo parlors... (more) Paperback: 488 pages Publisher: Duke University Press Books (June 10, 1999) Language: English ISBN-10: 0822323133 ISBN-13: 978-0822323136
“A Powerless Seeker: Merezhkovsky’s Romance as Life-Writing” by Julia Friedman In Symbolism, its Origins and Consequences. Edited by Rosina Neginsky. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2010 Hardcover: 665 pages Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing New edition edition (October 1, 2010) Language: English ISBN-10: 1443823929 ISBN-13: 978-1443823920
“The Writing-Drawing Continuum of Alexei Remizov,” by Julia Friedman "Elective affinities" - a notion originally borrowed by Goethe for his 1809 novel of the same title from eighteenth-century chemistry - here refers to the active role of the two partners in the relationship of the pictorial and the verbal... In In Elective Affinities: Word & Image Interactions 6, 2008 Edited by Catriona McLeod, Véronique Plesch and Charlotte Schoell-Glass. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi Paperback: 422 pages Publisher: Rodopi (June 20, 2009) Language: English ISBN-10: 9042026189 ISBN-13: 978-9042026186
“Alexei Remizov’s Creative Act,” by Julia Friedman. Edited by Maurice Geracht and Frédéric Ogée. In Interfaces: Image Text Language, vol. 29, 2010
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Julia Friedman
- Monuments we deserve December 22, 2025
  In this essay, I look beyond the familiar arguments for preservation or removal to ask what these objects actually do in civic life. Monuments compress history into visible form, but they also expose the tensions between reverence and critique. At a moment when public memory is deeply contested, monuments become mirrors, reflecting contemporary values as […]
  jfriedman
- Wayne Thiebaud’s Figure Paintings December 17, 2025
  Rejecting sentimental or anecdotal portraiture, Thiebaud cultivates a suspended psychological charge, inviting viewers into the role of Wollheim’s “unrepresented spectator.” His sitters—poised before or after action—occupy pared-down spaces where gesture is displaced by the quiet gravity of presence. Through this deliberate withholding, Thiebaud reanimates classical problems of painting, aligning himself with Velázquez and Manet while […]
  jfriedman
- The art of demolition November 2, 2025
  The notorious 19th-century anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who proclaimed that “the urge for destruction is also a creative urge,” has found an unlikely disciple in Trump. Considered together, the 1980 and 2025 episodes teach the lesson that destruction can be a form of authorship. Once the reliefs were gone, their loss defined both the building and […]
  jfriedman
- Posthumanism, memes, and the end of the real September 26, 2025
  Walter Benjamin called the twentieth century “the age of mechanical reproduction,” but his contemporaries were still capable of distinguishing between a celebrity’s real personality and her image. The twenty-first century is the age of digital reproduction, and it forces us to ask whether the general public still possesses the capacity to recognize such a distinction. […]
  jfriedman
- Svetlana Alpers on Art and Art History July 19, 2025
  Perhaps this is why Alpers is befuddled by today’s disciplinary confusion in which art, the master, is subjugated by art history, supposedly its emissary. Consider the following remark she made in a 2022 follow-up to the earlier conversation with Ziegler: “I agree with my great, late art historian friend Michael Podro, who said that painting […]
  jfriedman
- Wayne Thiebaud at the Legion of Honor July 19, 2025
  “Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art,” which opened at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco on March 22, is organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and curated by Timothy Anglin Burgard. Its premise, spelled out in the title, is straight forward enough and firmly based on the […]
  jfriedman
- Decorating Our Decline May 26, 2025
  When British sculptor Thomas J Price explains that his “strategy of inclusion” will counter the “endless stream of limiting tropes and identities for Black people,” he is inadvertently mimicking totalitarian injunctions.
  jfriedman

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