.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Tom Friedman's sculptures and photographs are an art of the everyday. In the past fifteen years he has worked with an assortment of modest, unremarkable materials including toothpaste, sugar cubes, laundry detergent, toothpicks, spaghetti, Play Doh, Life Savers, and the Pepto Bismol pictured here. "I try to establish a logical connection between what a material is, how it is transformed, and what it becomes," (quoted in John Miller, "Tom Friedman," Index, January 1997, p. 33). With the help of the title, we can identify the substance in this small photograph, but in his hands a dose of stomach medicine morphs into something else entirely.
Here, a grainy slate blue background throws the bubblegum pink of the elixir into sharp relief. In some cases Friedman lets his source material stand on its own, but more often than not he gives it a new life through alteration. Most of his projects are exactingly time-consuming; he has hewn his own self-portrait from one aspirin quite the same way again.
quite the same way again.
Here, a grainy slate blue background throws the bubblegum pink of the elixir into sharp relief. In some cases Friedman lets his source material stand on its own, but more often than not he gives it a new life through alteration. Most of his projects are exactingly time-consuming; he has hewn his own self-portrait from one aspirin quite the same way again.
quite the same way again.