Good Times
January 18, 2023 — April 2, 2023
Oolite Arts (Miami, FL)
Read the exhibition catalogue for Good Times here.
In Good Times, multi-disciplinary artist Chris Friday continues her exploration of the depiction of Black bodies and their presence/absence in contemporary space. Sourcing personal narratives, expressions of popular culture, and communal ritual, Friday utilizes drawing, video, illustration, sound, and ceramic sculpture to create installations that prompt the viewer to consider more expansive notions of blackness and where communities – known and unknown – are given a space to dialogue, reflect, and celebrate.
Friday’s subjects – family, friends, colleagues – and the settings in which they exist, become mechanisms to unsettle traditional hierarchies and arrangements of power. In particular, she presents large-scale drawings of figures in acts of leisure – playing, dancing, resting – that refuse full exposure in a slight but noticeable turning away from the viewer. By placing them in the public realm (i.e. the gallery space), but limiting access to their interiority, Friday’s works inhabit a liminal space that is at once visible and hidden, silent and defiant.
“[Friday] establishes a practice based on the use of the inward turn, of finding comfort in interiority, of grounding her work in the textures of everyday life, and of privileging everyday moments as liberatory. She doesn’t reject the inevitability of a life conditioned by scarcity or precarity; rather, she denies an existence wholly defined by it. Within this framework, she presents a more personal and nuanced perspective of good times, not as a sarcastic resignation to the expected, but as a spectrum of realities that accommodates a varied and dynamic set of lived experiences. “
Press
Miami New Times
Hangin' In and Jivin': Chris Friday's "Good Times" at Oolite Arts Celebrates Black Joy
By: Isabella Marie García
Miami Art Zine
At Oolite Arts, Chris Friday Explores the Duality of 'Good Times'
By: Michelle F. Solomon