Amanda Friedman / Peter LaBier Exhibition

Safe Gallery

This event has ended.

The most recent work by Amanda Friedman expands from her home studio practice and extends a long standing artist tradition of yielding work along habitation. Friedman believes emotion is tied to architecture and allows her surroundings to inform and absorb into her work. For this exhibition, the contents of her studio have been transported to the gallery, complete with wooden storage loft, cardboard floor protection, and the scrawled notations both written and drawn that accumulate during her holistic process. The transplanted structure in the context of the gallery space is a sculptural element elaborated by drawings, fabric scraps, made objects, paint smudges, and writing. The construct serves as a physical manifestation of Friedman’s thought process; as well as a stage for a performance written by the artist and adapted from the poetry of Helen Adam. Adam was one of the few female poets who influenced / participated in the Beat Generation. Her poetry was primarily in the form of ballads and was preoccupied with the supernatural. Friedman’s production, Helen Rides, is a one act play in five scenes to be performed at the gallery in conjunction with the exhibition. The scenes have been planned out via Friedman’s creative visual process and conceived on the premise that paintings and drawings equate to bodies and moving parts in space. As the script organically arose from visual thought, collaged material, and hand-written notation; the tactile work was concurrently charged by Friedman’s abode. Taking cues from old stained glass windows, and disassembled doorways; Friedman’s drawings, sculptures, and paintings take on the aura of her pre-war Brooklyn apartment. The three main characters are “Pyramid Dancers” who protect an unknown source of desire from witches who take on the appearance of bright blue moths. Time is non-linear, actions happen during dreams and through other dimensions; the setting oscillates between a disheveled apartment and an eerie meadow. Helen Adam herself says of the dancers, “Their heads are cones, or pyramids, or turning circles of pure light; and they have danced forever, since the planet first spun, round that well of shallow golden water that bubbles in the grass, rising from the streams of Eden, or some even more ancient lost Paradise”. Movement, lighting, and gesture are just as vital, if not more so, than the spoken dialogue in this performance. Painting and dance are linked; mark-making is not just confined to movements of the hand, but instead a whole-body-mind-space. Drawing is the integral backbone of this oeuvre, and several of Friedman’s prophetic compositions are framed and displayed in the gallery. The setting and actions of the play embody the spirit of the drawings as multiple planes within the space make spontaneous, mystifying worlds.

Likewise, drawing is an essential foundation for the current work of Peter LaBier. LaBier works from a trove of drawings he made between the ages of 4 and 14 years old, all of which uncover questions about hegemonic power and their effects on how we learn to perceive the world. The assumptions originally present in the drawings are re-evaluated through the process of revisiting the images as an adult. Selecting, recomposing, and painting the illustrations with a completely different perspective of priorities is an inherently critical gesture. LaBier’s uncanny approach to the subject facilitates an open ended interpretation that resists the hierarchical relationship between black and white, female and male, child and adult, animal and human. The loaded caricatures are layered and superimposed on one another amidst the painted field, continually suspended in the tension between abstraction and representation. The group of paintings which have emerged from this exploration are a glimpse into childhood, preconception, self-awareness, and the transcendent power of painting. LaBier offers us shards of reality to pick up and put back together in a higher consciousness, and perhaps even eradicate old modes of thinking.

Amanda Friedman is an artist living in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a MFA in Painting from Bard College where she was awarded the Hartog Travel Grant in 2016. She has participated in such residencies as The Shandaken Project, Frontispiece, and Vermont Studio Center. Since 2009, she has been in numerous exhibitions including those at Situations, Eli Ping Gallery, and SOUTHFIRST. She was the co-curator of Vision Quest, an exhibition at Nicole Klagsburn Gallery in 2012 and she co-founded Essex Flowers, an artist-run space in the Lower East Side. In 2013 Peradam published her artist’s book, Because Nothing Ends and in 2014 Miniature Garden published her artist’s book (in collaboration with Ariel Dill and Denise Schatz), Drawing Hilma Af Klint. In the last several years she has staged plays in conjunction with her installations at U.S. Blues, Essex Flowers, and Bard College.

Peter LaBier is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, drawing, music, dance and performance. He is the founding member of the New York based band, Psychobuildings. His work has been exhibited in New York, LA, Miami, Chicago, Houston, and internationally in Berlin and Hamburg. He has performed at the Jewish Museum in New York, NADA Presents, and Performa 17. Peter LaBier received his B.A. at Vassar College and his MFA at Columbia University in 2017.

A one act play by Amanda Friedman called Helen Rides to be performed on May 5th, 7:30pm.
with: Clara Chapin Hess, Jo’Lisa Jones, Gretta Johnson, and others
music by: Josh Brand and Joanna Yagerman
props and costumes by: Andrew D’Angelo and Amanda Friedman
makeup: Andrew D’Angelo
lighting and additional assistance by: Irina Jasnowski Pascual
choreography by: Clara Chapin Hess, Jo’Lisa Jones, and others
special thanks to: Charity Coleman and The Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo Libraries written and directed by: Amanda Friedman
with text by: Helen Adam