White Room: Charley Friedman

Charley Friedman works in diverse media, including photography, sculpture, video and live performance. Grounded in the artist’s own personal experiences and relationships, his work combines unusual or startling images and humorous materials. For his White Room, Friedman fills the gallery with an all-encompassing environment made of eggs which have been emptied and shellacked with resin, some caked with dried yolk. These eggshells are arranged to form gracefully undulating daisies which seem to grow wildly from the gallery floor and cover the walls. The installation rides the borders between nature and artifice, beauty and repugnance, existence and demise. Friedman has had solo exhibitions at the Queens Museum of Art (2002) and CRP Inc., NY (1998) and has been in group shows at such venues as Hallwalls, Buffalo (2003) and PS1 (2002). His work has been shown at White Columns in two group exhibitions, Face Value (2002) and Posers (2000). Friedman received his MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University, Boston and his BFA from Macalester College in St. Paul, MN.