art
Jonah Freeman at Reed Art Week
Reed Arts Week brings Brooklyn-based artist Jonah Freeman to town with his film The Franklin Abraham screening today tat 5:30 PM at Vollum Lounge. The screening will be followed by Q & A with the artist. (Enter Reed’s campus via the main entrance and you’d run right into Vollum the way I read this map.)
The Franklin Abraham is a short film that, in conjunction with a set of collages, imagines the upper West Side as a 150-year-old endlessly expanding building with two million residents. You’ll recall Freeman gained notoriety for his collaborative installation Black Acid Co-op (Hello Meth Lab in the Sun) at Deitch Projects in 2009 (16 Miles has photos).
Filip Tejchman interviewed Freeman about The Franklin Abraham and Hello Meth Lab (an earlier iteration of Black Acid Co-op) in issue 11 of Museo Magazine. An excerpt:
The Franklin Abraham came out of thinking about interior space, but I wanted scale to be something ridiculous. One beginning for the piece was the idea that in New York, you’re always inside. Even when you’re outside, it’s always like a big interior. It was a goofy idea: what if we smooshed all the buildings together? What if the Upper West Side was compressed into one building? What would be the most extreme and stupidest place to take this? A building for one million people to live in. And then I thought, well, let’s just make it two million, if it’s going to go into the realm of the ridiculous. It becomes immediately unbelievable, but it’s also rich and thick with intimate interior spaces because of that scale. The camera is a sort of roving eye. You get the sense that the camera is almost a character, moving through the building, stopping on these observations, and through that, you get a sense of the scale of the building. The collages grew organically because I imagined this world, and there were necessities to articulate it. I don’t draw, but I am a photographer, so I could take photographs and collage them together. I pieced the photographs together and connected all the buildings. This process of making the images was similar to the way the building [would have been] built—added on to and added on to over years. They’re in a mishmash of styles.
POSTED: March 5th, 2010 | AUTHOR: lisa | FILED UNDER: art | TAGS: jonah freeman, museo magazine, reed arts week, the franklin abraham | 1 Comment »
Props to the RAW organizers for putting together an interesting week of art events. The Jonah Freeman screening was quite good and culminated with an informative Q&A . RAW should have received more coverage in the Portland art scene, First Thursday and First Friday openings/events paled in comparison.