Terri Friedman: Rewire. Curated by Kathy Butterly

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TERRI FRIEDMAN

137­ West 25th Street New York, NY 10001

cuear tfoundation.org

TERRI FRIEDMAN Rewire Curated by KATHY BUTTERLY

September 2 - 29, 2020 1

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Awe/ful, 2018 Wool, acrylic, cotton, metallic fibers 45 x 64 inches

REWIRE

Terri Friedman

My work responds to the current climate of anxiety and uncertainty. How do we live with heartbreak and gratitude at the same time? Anger and joy?

Dread and hope? One possibility is neuroplasticity. The brain, which for centuries was thought to be inflexible and unchanging, unable to create new neural pathways after childhood or trauma, is actually able to grow new connections. Even gratitude practiced over time can rewire the brain.

Brain science, in particular research on neuroplasticity and epigenetics (the study of how gene expression is affected by environmental factors) are all growing fields that set the context for my work. Like a loom, neurons that fire together wire together. From centuries of response to the “fight or flight” instinct, our brains are wired for negativity. How does a placebo work? The brain believes it will. Likewise, negative expectations can be self-fulfilling. It takes mindfulness to not fire, wire, and reinforce the negative. Through the medium 4

of fiber, I explore how brain chemistry can create elevated emotional states. Serotonin.

Endorphins. Dopamine. Oxytocin.

Cultivating elevated states and happy hormones is a political and personal weapon against indulging in despair.

Dirty Dazzle. Sickly Sweet. Angry Joy. Happy Dread. How do we hold opposites simultaneously? The awkward, uncertain, chromatic, complicated, imperfect, theatrical, and ornate mirror our unhinged world and the vulnerable human experience of being an individual. Both confrontational and comforting, my palette of acid yellows, dirty ochres, patriotic flag colors, and hot pinks reflect unraveling and renewal. I make sense of personal and world events through color, abstraction, and words.

As Sister Corita Kent’s posters enlisted text, abstraction, and color to explore the topical issues of her time, I employ similar strategies. My weavings are my somatic “posters” of urgency.

We wake up daily to devastating news of political corruption,

lies, climate adaptation, bigotry, global wars, gun violence, homelessness, and personal loss and challenge. Sometimes, all I want to do is scream.

Abstraction can create the most powerful expression of the unexplainable and unknowable. The words that I choose to weave into my work are small, nondescript, and purposely unspecific.

Enough. If Only. IN/HALE/EX. Awe/ful. Wake-up. Enveloped and camouflaged by the tapestries, they are a suggestion rather than a lecture.

The act of weaving unifies: warp and weft, left and right brain. I weave new neural pathways on my loom and in my brain.

Weaving is medicine. My work explores those places where the political and emotional bodies intersect. Responding to anxiety, anger, and grief, each weaving is an agitated, yet affirmative, scream.

Terri Friedman’s work has traversed the landscape of paint, kinetic sculpture, writing, collaboration, and now, fiber.

She explores issues of gender, the mind and body, and more recently, neuroplasticity and resilience. After receiving her BA from Brown University and her MFA from the Claremont Graduate School, she launched her career in Los Angeles.

Friedman has been included in solo and group exhibitions at home and abroad at such venues as the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive’s Art Wall; James Cohan Gallery; Lancaster Museum of Art and History; Long Beach Museum of Art; San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art; CODA Museum, Apeldoorn, Netherlands; Geffen Contemporary MOCA; Santa Monica Museum of Art; Orange County Museum of Art; Torrance Art Museum; San Jose Museum of Art; John Michael Kohler Art Center; and numerous galleries in the United States and abroad.

Her work has received critical reviews in publications such as Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, Sculpture, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Artsy, and more. In 2019, she was featured in Vitamin T: Threads and Textiles in Contemporary Art (Phaidon Press). Friedman currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family and is an Associate Professor at the California College of the Arts.

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KATHY BUTTERLY Curator-Mentor

Terri Friedman weaves colors, forms, and ideas into strikingly beautiful and potent statements.

These refer to factual and psychological states of being in our current political and environmental circumstances. Her palette is seductive yet discomforting, as is the way she handles her medium and her message.

I first came across Terri’s work a little under three years ago—two years after she began weaving.

Prior to this, she focused separately on two-dimensional painting and three-dimensional sculptures. Her new woven paintings synthesize these two different approaches into powerful and distinct artworks.

Terri’s use of color is compelling.

Color is the first thing to notice when viewing her weavings—it’s in your face, radiant, seductive, oppositional, and warm, all at the same time. The work is at times soothing, then suddenly tense, as when your eyes glide 6

over woven layers of color in harmony and are then jolted by a sudden tightening and distortion of tension. This is storytelling— flow and tension, singing then screaming…soft pink next to an acid rain yellow. Terri combines abstraction and words to express herself as a feminist and environmentalist. Her use of color, technique, and abstraction abound with confidence—a confidence lived rather than a confidence spoken.

Terri’s weavings exude vivacious energy and feel so spontaneous, yet they are not. Her woven paintings are methodically and meticulously planned and executed. Each line and layer of color is carefully woven by her own hand. This is a time-consuming and controlled process.

Yet because of Terri’s technical mastery and passion, her works feel utterly wild and free—no small feat.

Hello Uncertainty exhibition view Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco, CA, 2019

Kathy Butterly is an artist who lives and works in New York City and Searsmont, Maine.

Butterly studied at Moore College of Art from 1982-86, where she received a BFA, and at the University of California, Davis from 1988-90, where she received an MFA. Butterly’s work has been exhibited widely around the US and abroad. Most recently, a mid-career survey consisting of 55 sculptures and works on paper was on view at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art in California.

She is currently preparing for

an upcoming exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, in January 2021. Butterly has been the recipient of many awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award, Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, PollockKrasner Foundation Award, Smithsonian Art Museum Contemporary Artist Award, and Artist Legacy Foundation Grant, among others. Her work is represented in NYC by James Cohan Gallery and in LA by Shoshana Wayne Gallery.

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Nobody is going anywhere, 2019 Wool, cotton, acrylic, metallic fibers 45 x 60 inches

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Oxytocin, 2018 Wool, cotton, hemp, acrylic, metallic fibers 77 x 50 inches

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Looking for what is not wrong, 2018 Wool, cotton, acrylic, metallic fibers, stained glass 86 x 42 inches

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Eudaimonia, 2018 Wool, acrylic, cotton, metallic fibers, stained glass 81 x 42 inches

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Enough, 2019 Wool, acrylic, cotton, hemp, chenille, metallic fibers 77 x 70 inches

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Your heart is the size of your fist, 2020 Wool, acrylic, cotton, hemp, chenille, metallic fibers 62 x 69 inches

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If Only, 2020 Wool, acrylic, cotton, hemp, chenille, metallic fibers 80 x 102 inches

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A Line Can Go Anywhere exhibition view James Cohan Gallery, New York, NY, 2017 Photo by Phoebe d'Heurle

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Green Placebo, 2019 Wool, jute, hemp, acrylic stained glass 74 x 41 inches

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SICKLY SWEET AND DIRTY DAZZLE:

Alexis Wilkinson

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 “AWE/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 stainedglass 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 24

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

TERRI FRIEDMAN'S TEXTILES work’s center to its peripheries, 2016 presidential election, which and errant strands dangle and coincided with her own medical droop. The lines thrust the eye anxieties prior to a clarifying into perpetual motion—there is diagnosis. Her textile works a pulsing or breathing quality intrinsically absorb and are to the work, albeit no steady material evidence of Friedman’s rhythm is found. Though not ethos—weaving as a form of representational of any singular healing. She connects the appendage or part, the work physical act of weaving (and, by is imbued with a body-like extension, an encounter with quality. In addition to the various her work) with the concept orifices rupturing the surface, of neuroplasticity, that is, the some cords appear intestinal capacity humans have to reshape or veiny, alluding to the body’s the neural pathways in our brains. inner mechanisms, while hairy Friedman asserts that she is or wrinkly textures evoke its interested in exploring our ability exterior qualities. Cheap cotton to redirect the brain’s responses piping speckled with highlighter- to generate more optimistic yellow paint twists, knots, and thought patterns. Her works hangs at the bottom, as if it could are both a result of and build unravel at any moment. This toward her desire to usher in a unconventional border expresses “collective rewiring” to contend the temperament of the entire with the tenor of anxiety and work—an ongoing tension distress in a turbulent cultural between chaos and control. and political climate, while recognizing that joy and despair When Friedman began weaving exist alongside one another. in 2014, she found the haptic, By creating compositions that repetitive task an effective have the potential to engender way to find calm in the wake simultaneous responses of anxieties building up to the of attraction and repulsion, 25

IN/HALE/EX, 2019 Wool, acrylic, cotton, hemp, chenille, metallic fibers 127 x 77 inches

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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 This contradiction—the complex, “work is purposely uncomfortable, messy human need to hold joy unfriendly, complex…over the and beauty alongside despair top, precarious, that place and decay—is reflected in how between the known and Friedman describes her color unknown.”¹ When viewing one of palette. She refers to her work as her simultaneously pleasurable “sickly sweet,” “dirty dazzle,” and and noxious visual landscapes, a “beautiful vomit.” A towering new person might experience feelings work titled IN/HALE/EX (2019), for of discomfort, a sensation of example, comprises green-tinged repulsion, or even a wave of yellows shot with neon pinks nausea. Friedman wants us and various gradients of purples. to consider how an aesthetic Wobbling textured sections and experience can be the source airy plaid planes cohere around a of reactions like discomfort bulbous, mustard-hued form and or repulsion, because such a purple star-like shape, around reactions are often shaped by which deep-black contours coil culturally enforced notions of and zigzag downward. Yet the work is porous; as its title indicates, taste and an (often unconscious) fear of the unknown or the “other.” there is room for breath. Orifices gape, flaps of thickly woven Friedman’s purposeful use of planes overlap, and delicate color puts her directly in dialogue netted gridding expands into with what artist and author David the peripheries. Unlikely patterns Batchelor terms “chromophobia.” collide. IN/HALE/EX is unruly, He coined the phrase to describe excessive, and purposefully a little the threat some people feel in disagreeable to look at. the face of abundant, excessive, bright color, which he identifies IN/HALE/EX could be as being historically linked to the understood as a command to take a breath in and out, marking fear of the “other.” He writes: one of the living body’s most In the West, since Antiquity, basic functions. Controlled colour has been systematically breathing can be used to combat marginalized, reviled, anxiety and produce elevated diminished and degraded. states, offering a reminder that, Generations of philosophers, while some experiences may be artists, art historians, and uncomfortable, we contain the cultural theorists of one stripe internal tools to move through or another have kept this such feelings. Friedman’s textile prejudice alive, warm, fed, work is deeply intertwined with and groomed. As with all her own body and emotional prejudices, its manifest form, its states, and she is interested in Friedman hopes to “rewire” her viewers' relationship to comfort and discomfort via notions of style and taste.

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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.

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.

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 choose to see the light coming 1 Terri Friedman, email to author, through the cracks?”³ In asking November 5, 2019. viewers to contend with visual 2 David Batchelor, Chromophobia and possibly visceral feelings of (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 22. discomfort, Friedman is asking 3 Terri Friedman, email to the author, us to consider, and ultimately to January 29, 2020. reroute, our own thinking. She 4 Terri Friedman, “Hello Uncertainty,” is interested in “the sickly sweet, Terri Friedman’s personal website, awkward, uncertain, chromatic, 2019, http://www.terrifriedman.com/ theatrical, and ornate because it hello-uncertainty-installation.

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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 (19952004); 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 PressEnterprise from 1987 to 1988.

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CUE Art Foundation is a visual arts center dedicated to creating essential career and educational opportunities for artists of all ages. Through exhibitions, arts education, and public programs, CUE provides artists, writers, and audiences with sustaining, meaningful experiences and resources.

CUE’s exhibition program aims to present new and exceptionally strong work by under-recognized and emerging artists based in the United States, and is committed to exhibiting work of all disciplines.

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Exhibiting artists are selected via a hybrid process, featuring solo exhibitions curated by established artists, alongside a series of solo and group exhibitions selected by an annual Open Call. In line with CUE’s commitment to providing substantive professional development opportunities, curators and Open Call panelists also serve as mentors to the exhibiting artists, providing support throughout the process of developing their exhibition.

We are honored to work with artist Kathy Butterly as the curator of this exhibition.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

ADVISORY COUNCIL

Theodore S. Berger Kate Buchanan Vernon Church Marcy Cohen Blake Horn Thomas K.Y. Hsu Steffani Jemison John S. Kiely Vivian Kuan Rachel Maniatis Aliza Nisenbaum Kyle Sheahen Lilly Wei Gregory Amenoff, Emeritus

Polly Apfelbaum Katie Cercone Lynn Crawford Ian Cooper Michelle Grabner Eleanor Heartney Trenton Doyle Hancock Pablo Helguera Paddy Johnson Deborah Kass Sharon Lockhart Juan Sรกnchez Lilly Wei Andrea Zittel Irving Sandler (in memoriam)

STAFF Corina Larkin Executive Director Beatrice Wolert-Weese Deputy Director Lilly Hern-Fondation Programs Manager Sharmistha Ray Development Manager Josephine Heston Programs Associate

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CUE Art Foundation's programs are made possible with the generous support of foundations, government agencies, corporations, and individuals.

MAJOR PROGRAMMATIC SUPPORT PROVIDED BY The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Anholt Services (USA), Inc. Aon PLC Chubb

Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP Clifford Chance

Compass Group Management LLC Merrill Corporation

The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Inc. The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation

New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts

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All ar twork Š Terri Friedman.

Cover image: Detail of Awe/ful, 2018.

Ar twork photography by Josef Jacques unless otherwise noted.

Catalogue design by Lilly Hern-Fondation.