After Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner and HULA, this time we are introducing Georgie Friedman, an interdisciplinary artist based in Boston.
Friedman’s portfolio includes a number of large-scale video installations. In Our Freezing and Melting World (2016), Friedman projected a video of snow and glacial ice onto the façade of The Cleveland Museum of Art’s atrium, a 1916 building.
Currently, Friedman is showing her exhibition Hurricane Lost (2021) at the Emerson Contemporary’s Media Art Gallery in Boston. She projects eight hurricane videos on sculptural forms hanging in the air.
Over the years, Friedman consistently used video installations and, less extensively, photography to explore the relationship between humans and nature. Like Our Freezing and Melting World (2016), many of her works make direct connections between built and natural environments. In Slippery Slope (2016), a smaller-scale video installation, a waterfall footage was projected onto a straight staircase at the Wold Center Atrium, Union College in New York. The playful work brought the waterfall near the campus back into the College.
In Friedman’s body of works, nature is represented through sea, hurricane, water, snow, ice, storm, lightning and wind. Apart from linking natural phenomena to human society, the artist’s video installations in a way also explore the fragmented view of videos. The digital mediation can show the natural phenomena but only part of them. When a gigantic hurricane was captured by a camera and then put before the audience, the audience have to go beyond the frame, imagining what was happening. Such imagination leaves space for the viewers to reconnect with nature. Unlike Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner and HULA whose pieces are more explicit representations of the climate crisis, Friedman’s works require more emotional engagement from audience. Friedman’s experimental installations bring nature which is now unfamiliar to some city dwellers closer, but not too close.
Further reading
Georgie Friedman’s vimeo channel
https://vimeo.com/georgiefriedman
Georgie Friedman’s website
