RACHEL FRIEDBERG: THE LANGUAGE OF MEMORY (page 2)
  previous  |  next

The titles of Friedberg's paintings - Once Upon a Time, Time's Running Out, and Goal Post - celebrate her journey through life. However, the artist's biography is not constituted as a narrative, nor does her conception of time follow a linear progression. Time is expressed as a flexible medium in Friedberg's work. In Old Love, the artist explores the identity of the self as fragments of memory. Like the ephemeral markers on a blackboard, written to be effaced, Friedberg's figures are vulnerable phantom projections. They are traces of experience, markers of absence, as the artist confronts an elusive past. In Time's Running Out and Goal Post, Friedberg elaborates upon this theme. Here she explores the idea of life as a process of discovery and fulfillment inscribed in the space between a lost past and an unknown future, between consummated experience and the realm of desire. Finally, with Creatrix the exploration of the self is located in mythic time, as the artist positions biography within the domain of the archetype. A female voyager prepares for a symbolic journey. As both primal mother and creator, Friedberg's mythical being exists before history, in a perpetual "once upon a time." Accompanied by a vessel and a ship, symbols of fertility and travel, containment and freedom, she is in full command of her destiny.