Martha Friedman: Castoffs

Exhibition Website

Jun 15 2018 - Feb 10 2019

In the exhibition Castoffs, sculptor Martha Friedman (U.S., born 1975) presents a new group of figurative sculptures that engage in a process of making and unmaking the body, challenging imposed logics that attempt to neatly contain or define it. Working with choreographer and dancer Silas Riener, Friedman created concrete casts from her collaborator’s idealized male form and then assembled the resulting distorted parts with metal armatures and spikes, as well as tubing and sheeting made of rubber. The result is a body dissected, a series of ambiguous parts that resist a totalizing, easily categorizable whole. Dispersed across a grid of pedestals, these hybrid sculptures are imbued with a tension between reverence for the virtuosic male body and a distrust of its idealized stature, a yearning to break with gendered hierarchies as well as to interrogate sculptural histories proceeding from Classical antiquity.

Interspersed among the concrete cast sculptures are blown-glass finger forms positioned in a gesture that evokes the act of “fingering” or penetration. These sculptures were inspired by Egyptian two-finger amulets that were placed at the site of incision after embalming to protect the integrity of the body in the afterlife. Friedman’s fingers repurpose their ancient forerunners to probe the gallery space and symbolically hold open the possibility of undoing the body and the social and cultural constructs that constitute it.

Across Friedman’s work is an interest in processes and materials that evoke the pleasures, anxieties, and vulnerabilities of having a body. Friedman’s playful and humorous early work of enlarged versions of commonplace items such as nails and waffles has in recent years evolved a sharper edge, both literally and metaphorically, engaging with the entangled relations between agency and constraint, embodiment and dissociation, violence and desire. 

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website 

  • Sculpture
  • American
  • Contemporary
  • Martha Friedman

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