Zipora Fried, Umibozu Trilogy, Part 1, 2015, HD Video (color, sound), 4:00 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and On Stellar Rays. Photo: Adam Reich.
What Lies Beneath the Surface: Zipora Fried at Marfa Contemporary
Zipora Fried's exhibition "Some Things Have Meaning, Others Don't" at Marfa Contemporary rises like a mirage from the middle of the desert of western Texas. The New York-based artist's work plays at the intersection of surface and depth, order and chaos. Small, human-scale gestures reach epic proportions and the trappings of the domestic collide with the unknown and unfathomable reaches of nature. "We are all hidden behind a fragile cover of sophistication and balance," as Fried recently told Art Desk magazine. With a practice that draws on Minimalist aesthetics with an undertow of the Romantic, Fried's work reflects and refracts the unique qualities of the desert landscape that is its temporary home, from October 9, 2015 through January 4, 2016.
Zipora Fried, Some Things Have Meaning, Others Don't, 2015, installation view, Marfa Contemporary. Photo: Harris Mizrahi.
"Marfa is such a unique place," says Sophie Landres, who curated Zipora Fried's exhibition at Marfa Contemporary. With the Chinati Foundation just a short distance away, the influence of Donald Judd's landmark art museum can be felt here, as it does throughout the small Texan town. The stark, isolated high desert landscape that attracted the Minimalist artist to the area continues to inspire the many artists that followed. While Fried's work was not made to directly respond to the landscape of Marfa, there is certainly an affinity present in its mystery and austerity between the work and the desert landscape and the Minimal forms that it is famous for. As Landres explained, the exhibition "allows for the points of correspondence between her work in terms of its form, process, impact and effect, and all that Marfa has come to symbolize" to come to the fore.
Zipora Fried, Some Things Have Meaning, Others Don't, 2015, installation view, Marfa Contemporary. Photo: Harris Mizrahi.
Landres describes the curatorial process with Fried as developing in an intuitive way with the space at Marfa Contemporary. The exhibition is arranged in a sequence of different moods that the viewer passes through, from light to dark, from the warmth of the desert to the chill of the ocean floor. "Zipora and I had talked about the idea of [the viewer] entering the space, [and being] bathed in this golden light," she says, "and then they would come into a larger room where her drawings would hold court." This procession continues, as the works become darker and darker, "like going down into the ocean's abyss," before concluding in the final room with a video work, the feel of which Landres describes as "very sub-aquatic."
Zipora Fried, Jojo, 2015, wood, baseball bats, and acrylic, 79 x 52 x 32 in. Courtesy of the artist and On Stellar Rays. Photo: Adam Reich.
Many of Fried's works evince this kind of duality--between light and dark, order and chaos. In the 2015 work Jojo, this duality is embodied between the burnished surface of smooth metal and the haphazard, even violent assemblage of baseball bats bursting from its opposite side. In the catalogue essay, Landres describes it as "a duality of interior turmoil over against glossy appearance, or perhaps more romantically, untamed nature over against culture's constructs."
Zipora Fried, If I Could See, 2015, steel, acrylic, and conch shell, 37 x 42 x 29 in. Courtesy of the artist and On Stellar Rays. Photo: Adam Reich.
Reflective surfaces reappear throughout the exhibition. In the main gallery, Fried has affixed gold reflective surfaces to select sides of the benches--their boxlike shapes "a nod to Donald Judd," Landres says--placing the forms in conversation with the drawings on the walls. In Umibozu and If I Could See (both works 2015), tabletops covered with reflective acrylic provide the glassy surrealist environments against which Fried positions a single conch shell. Hovering there, as above perpetually still waters, the shell is revealed in a way that we may see every curve and striation of the natural form from every angle. One can imagine the echo of the ocean emanating from the spiraling interior of the shell, doubled in its image, yet containing impenetrable depths.
Zipora Fried, Dark Indigo, 2015, colored pencil on paper, 90 x 52 1/2 in. Courtesy of the artist and On Stellar Rays. Photo: Adam Reich.
While the sculptural works have an undeniable draw, Landres conceived of this exhibition as an opportunity to showcase Fried's drawings. "This is the first show that so many of her drawings have been shown at once, even though they've been a staple of her practice for many years," she remarks. Fried's drawings are tight and dense, comprised of short vertical lines laid out in steady rows, "minimalist displays of continuity within a unified space," as Landres describes them. Rendered in colored pencil or graphite, the drawings evoke horizon lines and night skies; in Black and Colors (2015) one might want to recognize a desert landscape silhouetted against a coral pink sky. Fried's practice recalls both the ordered geometries of Sol Lewitt and the desert asceticism of Agnes Martin, yet despite its spare austerity, resists rigid forms. All I Thought and Forgot (2009), a 28-foot-long drawing of even graphite marks, hangs like a scroll from the ceiling, not quite grazing the floor, the edges of the paper rolling up in gentle curls.
Zipora Fried, Some Things Have Meaning, Others Don't, 2015, installation view, Marfa Contemporary. Photo: Harris Mizrahi.
The final work, Umibozu Trilogy, Part I, plunges the viewer into a dark room with a video showing underwater footage juxtaposed with eerie, digitally layered landscapes of unnatural colors and high-definition edges, with a soundtrack of "churning water and what Zipora refers to as 'mermaid whispers,'" Landres says. In Japanese folklore, the umibozu is a huge, featureless black sea creature that rises from the depths to capsize ships when its name is spoken. In Fried's video, a woman struggles underwater, a conch shell appears to emanate golden rays over a shimmering sea, a group of skulls rise, twinkling, from the water. "To put it in an art historical context," Landres says, "one has to think of the sublime, and all of the Romantic painters who were so frightened by the incredible beauty and violence of nature." As in all of Fried's work, it seems there is an immeasurable depth beneath the surface that holds the unimaginable.
Zipora Fried, Some Things Have Meaning, Others Don't, 2015, installation view, Marfa Contemporary. Photo: Harris Mizrahi.
The art world may know Marfa, Texas primarily as a cultural site, a place of pilgrimage for Minimalism and contemporary art in the midst of the high desert. But to the wider world, Marfa is equally known for an unexplained phenomenon known as the "Marfa lights." On clear nights, if one gazes southwest toward the Chinati Mountains, these mysterious, moving orbs of light might be seen to dance in the distance. Floating just above the desert floor or high in the air, the glowing lights move and shift, sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly, sometimes merging with one another, or dividing like cells. Most attribute the lights to atmospheric refractions from a nearby highway, even though the earliest recorded instance of the Marfa lights dates long before the invention of the automobile. Mirage or mystery, these desert illuminations hint at the threshold between human perception and the strangeness of the sublime. Fried's work seems right at home in this setting.
Zipora Fried, Umibozu Trilogy, Part 1, 2015, HD Video (color, sound), 4:00 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and On Stellar Rays. Photo: Adam Reich.
--Natalie Hegert