Marley
Freeman: Never Give a Sword to a Man Who Can’t Dance
January
24 – March 04, 2017
PSM,
Köpenicker Straße 126, 10179 Berlin
All
installation views at PSM, Berlin 2017
All
images by Nick Ash
Marley Freeman
Never Give a Sword to a Man Who
Can’t Dance
Marley Freeman is showing a group of
paintings and objects that speak
to each other
in curious and playfully awkward tones, with velvet
textures, running pools, bouncing shags, and aging crackles. There is a lot of
wet-on-wet, borderless-ness, and sliding around. In her studio, she mixes a
group of colors, a small vocabulary of a dozen or so cups of runny acrylic, and
then slowly builds an architecture of transparent pathways, openings, and
stairs.The paintings are created gradually
out of wide, calligraphic strokes. More colors show up from mixing on the canvas,
or mixed mid-stream because they seem to be missing. Some colors are characters that appear
frequently in the painting process, others speak once and then leave.
Freeman incorporates textiles
arranged to coexist with her paintings and ceramics, their visual mutuality
clear. They are mostly old fabrics, with meaning added to their physicality
from use, atmosphere, neglect, sunlight, and age. The technical skill and
social histories embodied in the fabrics are displaced by time and have lost much
of their legible signification relating to class, labor, context, or money, at
least to a layperson like myself. They feel personal and used, but also exposed
and slightly blank. Freeman does not prescribe content to this open, mostly
illegible space. Rather, it’s presented
as just that: space and an historical
question mark.
I fantasize about the political
identity of these paintings, this practice, and all the objects and gestures
that come into it. There is an arrow
pointing backwards, to mid-twentieth century gestural abstraction, but with
none of the implied isolation or the cliché of grandiosity. Instead, I see a
position in these paintings that slyly denounces vanguardism, preferring a feminist
ethos of communitarian coexistence with its progenitors. The good manners of painting-as-game,
or painting-as-steely-wall-against-interlopers, or as strategic conceptual
résumé has been given only the slightest passing glance here. There is a preference for openness and the
curious problem of an irregular accumulation of incidents. These are things that simply begin, stop,
begin again, stop, begin again, and then occasionally conclude.
I saw Freeman give a presentation on
her work about a year ago. Painting
after painting was projected onto the screen, and each time she would announce:
“This one is about 12 inches by 17 inches,” or “This one is older, it’s a small
painting,” or “This one I just made, it’s maybe 8 inches.” Tension was building over the bluntness and
lack of directive around the work. It continued and gained a slightly comedic
rhythm. Finally, a professor raised his hand and carefully asked:
“Marley, do you feel like you know
what your paintings are about?”
“No. As soon as I start to know I
change it,” she replied.
—
Caitlin Keogh
Marley Freeman
(b.
1981) is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work can be considered a marginal
type of abstraction born of a desire and pursuit of difference, which draws on
a history with textiles. After working in the decorative arts in Southern
California and New York, Marley went on to pursue painting, earning a BFA from
the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Bard College’s
Milton Avery School of the Arts. Recent exhibitions
include Whatever Moves Between Us also Moves the World in General, Murray Guy, NYC;
A Summer Painting Show, PSM, Berlin; Cards for Porcino at Chert/Porcino, Berlin,
organized by David
Horvitz; Onion by the
Ocean, Underdonk Brooklyn, NYC;
Syntagma, curated by Natasha Lorens, the
New School, NYC; 247365, NYC; and Kansas Gallery, NYC