Dara Friedman

Applications are still being accepted for this fall’s Working Artists Lab with guest artist Dara Friedman and Silo City. The course is a 7-week intensive led by Dara with THD Professor Maria S. Horne. The class will meet on Friday afternoon at UB and on Saturday morning at Silo City.

The Lab will be centered on the creation of a labyrinth, River Hill, at Silo City, near the Buffalo Outer Harbor, and in collaboration with SC’s Director of Ecology, Josh Smith. The intention of River Hill is to be an active monument for positive transformation and growth. The design is a confluence of the striking meander of the Buffalo Creek, Silo City’s location, and ancient, sacred Ariadne-style labyrinth design.

The course itself is an artwork, created from collective parts, in which participants will learn how to navigate blockages in order to heal and gain wisdom in our relationships: personal, interpersonal, and with the world at large.

Dara Friedman is a German born artist and filmmaker working in Miami. She uses everyday sights and sounds as the raw material for film and video artworks that reverberate with emotional energy. With a background in structural film and dance, Friedman’s cinema calls for a radical reduction of the medium to its most essential material properties. In place of linear storylines, her films typically portray straightforward actions and situations that unfold according to predetermined rules and guidelines.

Yet for all of Friedman’s strenuous logic and discipline, her approach remains unabashedly sensual and emotive. Bearing rich imagery and a strong emphasis on bodily experience, her films generate moments of high-pitched, cathartic intensity as well as serene, even euphoric interludes.

Friedman’s solo exhibitions include: The Tiger’s Tail, San Carlo Cremona, Italy (2022), Harburger Kunstverein (2019), a mid-career survey Dara Friedman: Perfect Stranger, Pérez Art Museum Miami (2017-2018), accompanied by a catalog raisonée published by Prestel, Aspen Art Museum (2017), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014), Museum of Contemporary Art of Detroit (2014), Contemporary Art Museum of Raleigh, North California (2012), Public Art Fund New York (2007), and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York (1998, 2000, 2002, 2007, 2011, 2014 and 2017), Galleria Massimo Minini, Brescia, Italy (2002), Supportico Lopez, Berlin (2017), Galleria Franco Noero, Turin, Italy (2018), Kayne Griffin Corcoran (2014, 2017). Major public collections include The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; French National Collection, and Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf. Friedman is a recipient of the Rome Prize (1999) and a Guggenheim Fellow (2019). Recently she completed "The Empress", a large scale labyrinth commission designed with her mother Gundula Thormaehlen Friedman. She is currently in production with Ecologist Josh Smith on: River Hill, Silo City, Buffalo, University at Buffalo Arts Collaboratory, an active monumental garden and labyrinth transforming a quarter acre of brownfield with hardy pollinators and speaking to the meander of the Buffalo River .

https://www.darafriedman.com/