The Midwest Art Quarterly
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St. Louis, MO
William Shearburn Gallery
Tom Friedman: 6S, 5P, 1P, 1C and 1V
September 20, 2024–October 25, 2024
Friedman gives you objects that start out by making you mad for how stupidly disordered they seem, until there’s a magnetic flip and they become suddenly compelling (i.e., intentional-seeming). This same effect drives good works like the photographs (which are slightly edited to accentuate dumb little compositional qualities) and bad ones like a sculpture of spaghetti tossed at the wall (surprise, it’s painted steel). One work, Untitled (8½ x 11), deserves special mention. By turning the daunting blankness of a blank page into itself an arena for imaginative play, the piece focalizes this empty-gesture/significant-form dialectic.
—Troy Sherman