PROJECTING DARA FRIEDMAN
Dara Friedman is best known for her film and video installations, in which she uses the techniques of structuralist filmmaking to depict the lushness, ecstasy, and energy of everyday life. Dara Friedman: Projecting is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and curated by Elysia Borowy-Reeder, Executive Director.
PAST EXHIBITIONS
PROJECTING DARA FRIEDMAN
MAY 16 – JULY 27, 2014
Dara Friedman is best known for her film and video installations, in which she uses the techniques of structuralist filmmaking to depict the lushness, ecstasy, and energy of everyday life. She often distills, syncopates, reverses, loops, or otherwise alters familiar sounds and sights, drawing attention to the distinct sensory acts of hearing and seeing. Whether her work portrays a series of narrative fragments or a single evocative scene repeated over and over, Friedman heightens the emotional impact by cutting directly to the films climax in order to, as she puts it, “get to the part you really care about.”
Musical, 2007-8
For three weeks, in the fall of 2007, midtown Manhattan was the stage for Musical, a series of spontaneous actions orchestrated by artist and filmmaker Dara Friedman. From dawn to dusk, and occasionally in the middle of the night, office workers, mothers, schoolchildren, taxi drivers, doormen, tourists, divas, and grandparents broke into song, creating unexpected musical events and serendipitous urban moments for all who encountered them. Throughout the course of the project, nearly one hundred individual actions took place throughout the day and night, weekdays only, in the blocks between Grand Central Station and Central Park South, and between Broadway and Park Avenue.
Dancer, 2011
For Dancer (2011) Friedman enlisted Miami-based dancers of all stripes to dance through the city streets for the camera. Shot on 16mm black-and-white film and transferred to HD video, Dancer celebrates both the city and the medium of dance. With the city streets as a backdrop, dancers improvise, expressing the specificity of their styles and skills and making meaning through movement. Friedman explores notions of performativity, urban space, and the individual in the public sphere in this ebullient, poetic work.
PLAY, 2013
PLAY was developed as part of Friedman’s residency at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. In PLAY, 18 couples, some real life couples, others paired by the artist, all of them actors, develop and play out scenes of intimacy. The poetic, intense and humorous situations grow intuitively from a process of improvisational theater games created for the purpose. With this new work Friedman engages with actors and their ability to receive and transmit projected desires while at the same time laying bare theatrical and cinematic devices with Brechtian pleasure. The work is filmed in The Hammer Museum’s Billy Wilder Theater, a hippie shack in Topanga Canyon, and the streets of Los Angeles.
Friedman’s work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. She has exhibited most recently at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C. and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Born in Bad Kreuznach, Germany, Friedman now lives and works in Miami, Florida.
Exhibition programming support is generously provided by the Taubman Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts. Additional funding for programming and educational initiatives is provided by the Edith S. Briskin/Shirley K. Schlafer Foundation. Additional support is provided by The Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs and Renaissance Media.
Dara Friedman: Projecting is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and curated by Elysia Borowy-Reeder, Executive Director, and coordinated at MOCAD by Exhibitions Coordinator Zeb Smith.
