Nina Johnson is pleased to present Star People, a solo exhibition by Dara Friedman, a visual artist, creator of environmental earthworks, and filmmaker who engages with everyday sights and sounds as raw material for works that reverberate with emotional intensity. With a background in structural film and dance, her works call for a radical reduction of mediums to their most essential properties, while remaining unabashedly sensual and emotive. Bearing rich imagery and a strong emphasis on bodily experience, with Star People, Friedman expands her filmmaking practice of working with light and sound to a sequence of tangible sculptural forms.
The exhibition includes more than a dozen new works conceived specifically for this presentation. In Star People, a series of gracefully towering, mirrored shadow figures reflect light and the gaze. Some dangle sun-like brass gongs from their fingertips. The impossibility of a reflective shadow creates a sense of wonder. Others offer an opaque darkness, covered with black felt, the double entendre of the material intentional. Shadows and mirrors are both literally “flat” yet have endless depth. They are infinities. The liquid reflecting forms contain the condensed semiotics of light and vibration. Friedman invokes the Pleiades star cluster and its associations with kinship and passage between realms. In Golden Hand (Night Journey of the Sun), an elegant brass arm is visible, either emerging or disappearing from view. Alligator Eyes (Hill), a sculptural carpet installation shaped like a low hill or the eyes of an alligator peering above the water’s surface, invites viewers to recline and be supported. In the film Gong Camp, suns rise and set, overlapping and intermingling with the light seared edges of twirling cloth-draped figures, gongs reverberating throughout. The surrealist trope of humor darts throughout the exhibition.
I used to have a studio in the alleyway by Club Deuce on Miami Beach. In this studio there was a big metal door that I managed to unlock, and behind that was a vast moldering storage space with the ceiling caving in — like a secret behind a locked door. The metaphysical sense of something ‘being on the other side’ was a real estate reality. This discovery translated to the film Bim Bam (1999), a sort of revolving door that led to ‘the other side,’ another dimension, a place of light, but just briefly, although repeatedly, visited before returning. Dipping in a toe at the edge.
The silhouette, the light and the shadow of this earlier work is present in Star People. The echo of the slamming metal door morphed to a gentler, sustaining vibration: a dance, energetic and never-ending. Now these visitations have become less tentative, frequently traveled and investigated, both internally and cosmologically. It is no longer a place to visit, but what one is. The perceived metaphysical light beyond the body, is in fact of the body. In turn, the body is of Earth and therefore integrating within the larger cosmological order.
What is filmmaking? Let’s suppose the first film is the experience of watching the Sun set and the Moon rise on the stage that is the horizon line. This light-shadow-movement, a physical expression of emotion. The structural aspects (of film) are well suited to hold and support the intangibles: relationships of light, shadow, and feeling as it is received by the body.
If you are facing the Sun, your shadow is behind you. A constant companion when you walk in sunlight. When you turn to face your shadow, the back of your body is illuminated. The unseen, emanating forth in shining rays of black, can be felt.
Star People will be on view in the Upstairs Gallery at Nina Johnson through February 7, 2026.
