Installation View

Photo Credit Larry Gawel

Often mastering a medium only to abandon it after completing a single artwork, over 30+ years, Charley Friedman has produced an oeuvre designed to boggle the mind and the spirit. With a real sense of heart, sense of magic, and sense of humor, Charley’s work touches on religion and mysticism, propaganda and politics, artifice and consumer culture, ritual and material meaning. 

The connective tissue that unifies the work is human intimacy through the use of humor. Humor  as a material has no mass or volume yet is infinitely malleable. It magnifies vulnerabilities and prejudices, revealing individuals' humanity. Humor allows the ideas to take root in the body; it comes from the gut and is inherently emotional. The crux Friedman’s practice is to explore the absurd, tragic, and contradictory nature of living that humor can uniquely portray.

Friedman’s exhibition at The Elder Gallery is a mini-survey spanning 30 years.  It encompasses a plethora of materials and media all meticulously fabricated to look effortless. And although the solo exhibition might look like a group exhibition, all the works taken as a whole create a tapestry of common themes.