smoke the moon marks the advent of summer with I Wish I Had a River, a solo exhibition of new work by Toronto based painter Nancy Friedland. Friedland’s paintings rush forward in a wellspring of emotion, alchemizing small moments into glimmers of tenderness. The work will be on view from June 28, 2024 through August 4, 2024. Please join us for an opening reception on Friday, June 28th from 6 - 8pm.
The artist’s idiomatic style is defined by brushy, spatially curious scenes that revolve around expressive figuration. The bodies in Friedland’s work have an emanating presence, as if they are lit from within. Her landscapes feel deeply familiar. This is the artist's first painting show that focuses on investigating scenes from her own family dynamics, often beginning with photographs she has taken. Walking through this show is an invitation to rifle through her family photo album, to ask questions about a particular page that catches our eye.
“You can’t own a river”
A painter with a photographer’s eye and training, Friedland brings an insightful perspective to her work. Movement, translation and the specificities of a changing light are central preoccupations in Friedland’s practice. Throughout her pieces she retains a photographer's relationality; the first person perspective implied in and inherent to her scenes.
Friedland’s portraits are as much about her own positionality as they are about inference and association, history and futurity. A tributary of bloodlines: the mythic dailyness of moments lost and gained. Friedland’s work propels itself across her panels; sparks and slanted light taking on the same urgency and luminosity. Her scenes are full of another time while being obsessively devoted to the idiosyncrasies of place and object. Friedland’s work in I Wish I Had a River paints the familial as defined both by staying and leaving: those overlapping impulses and realities shaping our interactions with the people closest to us.
I wish I had a river so long
I would teach my feet to fly
Oh, I wish I had a river
I could skate away on
Cars, beds, birthday cake, a body of water. These objects serve as anchors throughout the artist’s work - marking and transcending time.
The scenes rendered in Friedland’s work are drenched in early summer’s futurity - a horizon that is made in the haze of afternoon daydreaming. This feeling is captured in Friedland’s car paintings: two headlights and an empty stretch of road emerge in a blushy dusk. It feels like all the other stories in the show are in contemplation on this roadway - as if they have emerged from a field of liminal planning, carried between two spaces.
Friedland’s parents appear in multiple paintings. Her children, too, emerge in moments of contemplative glance. There is a mystery to the timing she depicts: are the bodies in Friedland’s scenes arriving or departing? Has the party just begun or already ended? These moments are being filtered through her position as a mother, a daughter and as a sister. A vantage from what she was born into, rather than born of. There is a sense in these works that Friedland is figuring something out, that she needs to stay just a second longer to understand. The work made from this place has an immediacy and a longing - a feeling that the artist is grasping for a record of the immaterial as she lets it slip through her hands. Again, “you can’t own a river.” We cannot own our family, nor can we own the architecture of their experience, but we can observe, lay bare, and cultivate the mundane in all its fleeting beauty.
A river changes course on a dime and over lifetimes. We are no longer in the same light once we begin to describe it. The work in this show seems to revel in faulty translation - the slippage between what is seen, what is felt, and what is remembered in a knotted dance.
Nancy Friedland is an artist investigating narrative, landscape, and darkness in her work. After studying photography at the Ontario College of Art and Design she completed her MFA at the Rochester Institute of Technology as a Sir Edmund Walker Scholar. She has received grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts, and has exhibited across Canada and internationally. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with smoke the moon. Working primarily with her own photographs as source material, she is drawn to the magic that happens in the flawed translation from one medium to the next.