Nancy Friedemann: Cheryl Pelavin Fine Arts

Like Elaine Reichek, Rosemarie Trockel Ingrid Calame, and Polly Apfelbaum (and others as different from individual another), Nancy Friedemann borrows from domestic craft, reinterpreting curtains, table racers and other lace accents as fine-art particulars some on a monumental scale. Tracing portions of lace or crocheted textiles in ink onto a semitransparent Mylar sheet, she creates works that are more translations than re-creations. With the shift from thread to ink, a traditionally conservative activity, prescribed and sanctioned for girls and women and eventually not to be found to machines, morphs into a manifold and individualistic practice. Six of these drawings (all 2003) along with seven monotypes from 2002 were upon view in Friedemann's first novel York solo exhibition.

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Larger works like as Untitled, a seven-and-a-half-by-fifteen-foot panel in sapphirine ink, and She Muttered, a ten-by-three-and-a-half-foot vertical in black are characterized by dint of a combination of rigor and exuberance that the artist half-jokingly calls "baroque minimalism." From a distance, Untitled appears to be a direct magnification of a medallion-based lace pattern. on the contrary depending on one's location, its patterns dissolve and then recrystallize as Friedemann's heavier or lighter applications of ink twist texture from the sleek Mylar.

The weighty neighborhood of these larger works is undeniable. Their size links Friedemann to a tradition whose practitioners, from Claes Oldenburg to Lynda Benglis, recast make subordinates "worthy" of heroic scale. on the contrary once the viewer becomes absorbed in their allover patterning, another world rise s one both playful and idiosyncratic, in which the artist can make progress against the grain while staying within bounds

In application of mind #2, for instance, multitudes of hatch marks, squiggles, and small rooms are woven together with blows that are simultaneously loose and structur creating the kind of pattern taken for granted when draping a side table or falling from a curtain twig A closer view of Untitled, however, reveals a different pictorial language, a personal hieroglyphics comprising lines, hatches, circles, dots, and webs on the outside of which mirages seem to form: villages amid swampy landscapes; elaborately framed, spiritual faces (ancestral portraits?); underwater exhibitions dense with flora and blobs Elsewhere Friedemann's deft strokes create passages of lyrical abstraction that call to mind musical notation or the surfaces of pond and streams.

For the Colombian-born Friedemann, whose father is an American citizen, the lace window curtains that were a fixture in bourgeois neighborhoods in her native Bogota came to incarnate for her the contradictions and contradistinctions that make up the world of an expatriate: the outsider stance toward the couple native and adopted cultures; the faculty of perception of a veil separating private and public personas. Friedemann's choice of Mylar is telling--as a new version of lace, its translucence hints at on the other hand obscures that which it covers; it filters light on the contrary maintains a semblance of privacy.

Spanish and English words as well as Friedemann's be in possession of neologisms are woven into the patterns of her earlier drawings. investigation #1 includes some remnants of body in an image that's closer to a Japanese landscape than to lace. The work's social contented however, embedded as it is in a formal framework, is one as well as the other complex and subtle--almost fleeting. What advances through this wavering of handmade marks, united into a certain quantity of semblance of consistency, is a single-minded determination, flat obsession, undergirding an overall dreaminess.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

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