SLAP-STICK

MATT FREEDMAN

JAN 12, 2017 - Feb 25, 2017

Performance with collaborator Tim Spelios: Feb 9th at 7pm

FJORD Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of SLAP-STICK, a solo exhibition of sculptures, drawings and performance by New York-based artist and long time Philadelphia Professor Matt Freedman. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Philadelphia and first with FJORD Gallery. 

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SLAP-STICK will feature a living inventory of the artist’s recent sculptural and drawing works. The playfully grotesque and humorously morose stack against one another in a precarious storeroom, inviting viewers to inspect and connect works in unusual ways. The exhibition’s layout follows the model of Freedman’s performative storytelling to create a kind of improvisational academy, reconfiguring elements of the past into something completely new. In the artist’s words, “Somewhere in the mix we hope to get to something as close as possible to a moment of truth and to a point of living contact between maker and beholder.”

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Over the last decade Freedman has made a variety of works investigating the power of myth and memory in both the personal and cultural spheres. Drawing on fables as varied as Wile E. Coyote’s unending quest for Road Runner, the conflation of the Women’s US Open Tennis Final in 2012 with the Tennis Court Oath of 1789 and the subsequent French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, Freedman weaves together experience and fiction in a museum that is also an active test site.

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Matt Freedman grew up in Chicago, IL and received his B.A. from Harvard and M.A./M.F.A from the University of Iowa. He has worked as a cartoonist and long time educator at the University of Pennsylvania, mentoring generations of artists in Philadelphia. He currently works out of his studio in Queens and has held solo exhibitions at venues including Pierogi Gallery (Brooklyn), vertexList (Brooklyn), Studio 10 Gallery (Brooklyn), Valentine Gallery (Queens), Flipside (Brooklyn), FiveMyles (Brooklyn), and SculptureCenter (New York). Freedman has performed at PS1 MoMA (New York), the Brooklyn Museum, The Kitchen (New York).

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Click here for full press release.