Tom Friedman (American, born 1965)
untitled, 2000

Run Time: 1:42
Recorded by Jeff Fleming, Director / 2008

This is Tom Friedman's work. It's untitled, from 2000. It is a piece of paper. And the process is that he drew on the paper and then he cut out the white, leaving only the lines of the drawing. This is very, very typical of Tom Friedman's work. His work is very, very obsessive, it’s very, very laborious. And in fact he said that this piece is probably the most laborious piece that he's ever created.

So this piece of paper is suspended from the ceiling and it gives a feeling that this is a three-dimensional object. And if you stand back from it, it has the impression that it's three or four inches thick. And you don't even know what the material is and these images of figures and faces pop out of the drawing. You can see tiny faces and if you look back you can see larger faces. You can see an ear in the upper left, you can see a face in the center toward the right. There are numbers, there are stars, there are other things that pop out.

In his other works he uses a wide variety of materials, most of them commonplace, most of them very ordinary—from making a painting on the wall with toothpaste, or making a sculpture out of toothpicks, or making a sculpture out of Lifesavers©. He's even used toilet paper in his work, where he's rerolled—perfectly—a roll of toilet paper. So it becomes this amazing object. He's used bubble gum. What's so wonderful about his work is the fact that it is so laborious, it is so obsessively ridiculous. There's a great deal of humor in his work. But in this particular piece there's a great deal of magic.