This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition Terri Friedman: Rewire curated by Kathy Butterly, on view at CUE Art Foundation from September 2 - 29, 2020. This text is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE.
Terri Friedman, Green Placebo, 2019. Wool, jute, hemp, acrylic stained glass, 74 x 41 inches.
Terri Friedman’s textile panels buzz with urgency. She employs clamorous color palettes and assembles her works out of loose gestures, uneven textures, and yarn that spills out from both planes. Rogue cords dangle, droop, and gather. Often hiding in these compositions are words like “AW/FUL,” “WAKE UP,” and “ENOUGH,” signaling the personal and national anxiety that has engendered these frenetic forms. At the same time, Friedman’s work is buoyed by an ethos of optimism; her intention is to rewire and redirect the mind, and to weave pathways to pleasure and joy in tumultuous times. Gaps widen in her dense fibers, sometimes containing colored plexiglass or stained-glass pieces, letting in the light from the other side.
Although she constructs her works using a traditional floor loom, Friedman doesn’t identify as a fiber artist. She is a multidisciplinary artist, having moved from painting, to sculpture and installation, and most recently to weaving. She approaches the loom with the freedom of a visitor to the form, allowing the gestural touch of a painter and the material approach of a mixed-media artist to infiltrate her works. In combining high-quality natural fibers with cheap synthetic yarn without hesitation—sometimes even applying paint on top of thick cotton piping—she undermines a traditional hierarchy of materials.
Friedman’s painterly approach is exemplified in Enough (2019), which contains varied textures crashing into one another in a mash-up of controlled knits and loose ends. Detailed, tightly woven textile planes coursing with bruisy purples, neon yellows, and hot pinks zigzag laterally while the margins of the composition ooze inward with bumpy oversized cording. In place of balance, there is multidirectional movement: vivid gestures radiate from the work’s center to its peripheries, and errant strands dangle and droop. The lines thrust the eye into perpetual motion—there is a pulsing or breathing quality to the work, albeit no steady rhythm is found. Though not representational of any singular appendage or part, the work is imbued with a body-like quality. In addition to the various orifices rupturing the surface, some cords appear intestinal or veiny, alluding to the body’s inner mechanisms, while hairy or wrinkly textures evoke its exterior qualities. Cheap cotton piping speckled with highlighter-yellow paint twists, knots, and hangs at the bottom, as if it could unravel at any moment. This unconventional border expresses the temperament of the entire work—an ongoing tension between chaos and control.
When Friedman began weaving in 2014, she found the haptic, repetitive task an effective way to find calm in the wake of anxieties building up to the 2016 presidential election, which coincided with her own medical anxieties prior to a clarifying diagnosis. Her textile works intrinsically absorb and are material evidence of Friedman’s ethos—weaving as a form of healing. She connects the physical act of weaving (and, by extension, an encounter with her work) with the concept of neuroplasticity, that is, the capacity humans have to reshape the neural pathways in our brains. Friedman asserts that she is interested in exploring our ability to redirect the brain’s responses to generate more optimistic thought patterns. Her works are both a result of and build toward her desire to usher in a “collective rewiring” to contend with the tenor of anxiety and distress in a turbulent cultural and political climate, while recognizing that joy and despair exist alongside one another. By creating compositions that have the potential to engender simulataneous responses of attraction and repulsion, Friedman hopes to “rewire” her viewers unrelationship to comfort and discomfort via notions of style and taste.
This contradiction—the complex, messy human need to hold joy and beauty alongside despair and decay—is reflected in how Friedman describes her color palette. She refers to her work as “sickly sweet,” “dirty dazzle,” and “beautiful vomit.” A towering new work titled IN/HALE/EX (2019), for example, comprises green-tinged yellows shot with neon pinks and various gradients of purples. Wobbling textured sections and airy plaid planes cohere around a bulbous, mustard-hued form and a purple star-like shape, around which deep-black contours coil and zigzag downward. Yet the work is porous; as its title indicates, there is room for breath. Orifices gape, flaps of thickly woven planes overlap, and delicate netted gridding expands into the peripheries. Unlikely patterns collide. IN/HALE/EX is unruly, excessive, and purposefully a little disagreeable to look at.
IN/HALE/EX could be understood as a command to take a breath in and out, marking one of the living body’s most basic functions. Controlled breathing can be used to combat anxiety and produce elevated states, offering a reminder that, while some experiences may be uncomfortable, we contain the internal tools to move through such feelings. Friedman’s textile work is deeply intertwined with her own body and emotional states, and she is interested in prompting the viewer to attune to their own. The visual agitation in her works is therefore an attempt by Friedman to elicit a visceral reaction from her viewers. She asserts that the “work is purposely uncomfortable, unfriendly, complex…over the top, precarious, that place between the known and unknown.”[1] When viewing one of her simultaneously pleasurable and noxious visual landscapes, a person might experience feelings of discomfort, a sensation of repulsion, or even a wave of nausea. Friedman wants us to consider how an aesthetic experience can be the source of reactions like discomfort or repulsion, because such reactions are often shaped by culturally enforced notions of taste and an (often unconscious) fear of the unknown or the “other.”
Terri Friedman, IN/HALE/EX, 2019. Wool, acrylic, cotton, hemp, chenille, metallic fibers, 127 x 77 inches.
Friedman’s purposeful use of color puts her directly in dialogue with what artist and author David Batchelor terms “chromophobia.” He coined the phrase to describe the threat some people feel in the face of abundant, excessive, bright color, which he identifies as being historically linked to the fear of the “other.” He writes:
In the West, since Antiquity, colour has been systematically marginalized, reviled, diminished and degraded. Generations of philosophers, artists, art historians, and cultural theorists of one stripe or another have kept this prejudice alive, warm, fed, and groomed. As with all prejudices, its manifest form, its loathing, masks a fear: fear of contamination and corruption by something that is unknown or appears unknowable.[2]
This equation, he argues, aligns a lack of color with purity and bold color with the excessive, the vulgar, and impure qualities associated with the unknown “other,” indicating deep-seated class, race, and gender biases. If Friedman’s color palette induces a gut reaction of discomfort, or even nausea, perhaps this unconscious reaction suggests the entrenched social and cultural biases that Batchelor describes.
The relationship goes two ways: the forces that deem color to be impure and fearsome have real effects on those subjects who exist outside the predetermined range of acceptability. The body is subject to the social conditions that surround it: the brain and the gut share an intrinsic connection as the gut is an organ that contributes to our psychological states. For Friedman, the process of personal and collective healing starts with rewiring the brain. She explains, “We can’t control what comes at us, but we can attempt to control our response. Do I see the solid impassable wall? Am I fearful and anxious? Or do I chose to see the light coming through the cracks?”[3] In asking viewers to contend with visual and possibly visceral feelings of discomfort, Friedman is asking us to consider, and ultimately to reroute, our own thinking. She is interested in “the sickly sweet, awkward, uncertain, chromatic, theatrical, and ornate because it mirrors the unhinged world we live in and the vulnerable human experience.”[4]
By provoking this experience with her artworks, Friedman gives her viewers a testing ground to contend with their uncomfortable or difficult reactions. This is where her politics lie: there is a lot at stake in getting accustomed to discomfort. Friedman asks us to stay with the uncomfortable so we can pass through to the other side. She offers us the chance to see the neon light coming through the fissures in her works, to rewire our relationships to what we are conditioned to recognize as fearsome or disagreeable, and ultimately to heal.
[1] Terri Friedman, email to author, November 5, 2019.
[2] David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 22.
[3] Terri Friedman, email to the author, January 29, 2020.
[4] Terri Friedman, “Hello Uncertainty,” Terri Friedman’s personal website, 2019, http://www.terrifriedman.com/hello-uncertainty-installation.
This essay was written as part of the Art Critic Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICA-USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which pairs emerging writers with AICA-USA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA-USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season.
Alexis Wilkinson is a curator based in New York working between dance, performance, and visual art, driven by her background as a dancer. She has realized exhibitions and performances at SculptureCenter, the Hessel Museum, the Judd Foundation, A.I.R. Gallery, Abrons Arts Center, and The Luminary (MO). She is currently the Director of Exhibitions and Live Art at Knockdown Center in Queens, NY, where she organizes interdisciplinary exhibitions, performances, and events. Wilkinson holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College and a BA in Cultural Studies, Dance, and Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Mentor Charles Desmarais, appointed art critic at the San Francisco Chronicle in 2015, received the 2017 Rabkin Prize for Visual Arts Journalism. He was awarded an Art Critic’s Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1979. The years between, he spent as an avid lover of art, friend of artists, and leader of arts institutions. Desmarais has served as President of the San Francisco Art Institute (2011-2016) and Deputy Director for Art at the Brooklyn Museum (2004-2011). He was Director at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (1995- 2004); the Laguna Art Museum (1988-1994); and the California Museum of Photography at the University of California, Riverside (1981-1988). His extensive experience as an art writer includes numerous exhibition catalogues as well as work for Afterimage, American Art, Art in America, ARTnews, California, Grand Street, and elsewhere. He authored a regular column, “On Art,” for the Riverside Press-Enterprise from 1987 to 1988.