Photos
The Kitchen, February 2024, by Maria Baranova
Hurley Gallery, June 2021, by Rosalie O’Connor
TWO PERSON OPERATING SYSTEM Type 2 (2021)
A collaboration by Susan Marshall & Martha Friedman
Limited-audience (Covid) Preview June 29, 2021 | Princeton University’s Hurley Gallery
Collaborating Dancers Dare Ayorinde, Ching-I Chang, Miriam Gabriel, Luke Miller (Assistant Choreographer)
New York Premiere February 3 & 4, 2024 | The Kitchen, New York City
Collaborating Dancers Ching-I Chang, Miriam Gabriel, Paul Hamilton, Luke Miller (Assistant Choreographer)
Composer Dan Trueman
Two Person Operating System Type 2 continues a performance-installation series examining the intimate relationships between people and objects. Artist Martha Friedman and choreographer Susan Marshall seek to engage viewers to think about the sensory experience of inhabiting a body, and touching or navigating inanimate and animate bodies outside their own. Working with industrial objects and materials such as rubber and metal, dancers activate sculptures in complex patterns, probing preconceptions of physical boundaries.
In this iteration, two towers of metal tubes are each capable of supporting metal spikes and rotating in place. Long, fleshy rubber ropes are inserted, spooled and twisted through the sculpture by dancers engaging with the objects and each other in a series of methodical tasks performed with workerly precision. The evolving patterns of action and design explore the tensions between work and product, danger and intimacy, absurdity and purpose, soft and hard, in and out. This serves to complicate expectations of clear, binary contrasts often raised in gendered conversations about physical bodies.
Using the sound of the sculpture itself, composer Dan Trueman created a reverberating industrial environment in which the echoes of labor are heard and felt.
The first iteration of this project, Two Person Operating System (2016), premiered at NYU Institute of Fine Arts, was shown at Andrea Rosen Gallery (NYC), Jessica Silverman Gallery (SF), and a found warehouse in Brooklyn, and was written up in Artforum and The New Yorker, among others. Subsequent iterations of this evolving series of works will be performed at varied venues across the country.
Two Person Operating System 2 is made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts.
Martha Friedman, artist/Sculptor
Martha Friedman (b. 1977, Detroit, MI), earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1998) and an MFA from the Yale School of Art (2003). Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Art@Bainbridge, Princeton University Art Museum, NJ (2022); the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA (2018); the Institute of Fine Arts Great Hall, New York, NY (2016–2017); and Locust Projects, Miami, FL (2015–2016), among others. She frequently collaborates with choreographers Susan Marshall and Silas Riener, reflecting her interest in the intersection of sculpture and dance. Friedman is currently a senior lecturer in visual art at Princeton University, and she lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Martha Friedman is represented by Broadway, New York and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco. More at marthafriedmanwork.com.