The next Artist You Need To Know is Amy Friend.
Friend is a Canadian artist whose practice incorporates installation and collaboration – with an eye to community – under the larger umbrella of photographic methodologies. History, time, land – memory (the specificity and importance of place to ideas of being), dust, oceans and our larger place in the universe (whether literally or in terms of our experiences and interactions) all inform Friend’s artworks.
“Just as photographs are fragile objects in themselves, their content is often fragile as well. Amy Friend’s work highlights precisely these two qualities: the fragility of the photographic object and of life. The artist reuses, revisits, backlights -practicing holes on the images-, re-photographs and, therefore, re-signifies old portraits that came to her through different sources. With this elegant modus operandi she achieves something exceptional as she is able, through light – the raw material of photography – to bring these old images back to life; she is able to illuminate the darkness that surrounds the past and, at the same time, turn it into something beautiful.” (from here)
Friend often works in series – as her works have a narrative quality, in both a personal and larger societal sense – and the respective bodies of work have similarities in tone and concept that make Friend’s works almost like an ongoing visual autobiography.
The images below are from the series Tiny Tears Fill an Ocean : more about this body of work can be seen here.
Friend grew up near Windsor, Ontario and would attend OCADU (Toronto) : this was interrupted by a number of trips to international locales through Europe, Africa, Cuba, and the United States. She would earn a BFA Honours degree and BEd degree from York University (Toronto) and an MFA from the University of Windsor. She is an Associate Professor of Visual Arts at Brock University in St. Catharines, ON.
She has exhibited nationally and internationally. Significant exhibitions of Friend’s artworks include Gexto Photofestival (Spain), Paris Photo, incamera galerie (France), Museum London (Canada), Onassis Cultural Center (Greece), ASPA (Sardinia), DongGang Photography Museum (South Korea), GuatePhoto (Guatemala), Mosteiro de Tibães at the Encontros Da Imagem (Portugal), Rodman Hall (Canada), Photoville (New York, USA), National Portrait Gallery, (UK), and at the Abbaye De Silvacane, La Roque D’Antheron (France).
The images in the gallery below are from the series Multi-Verse.
“In my work I gravitate towards ideas relating to time, memory, impermanence, and the fluctuations of life. I tend to employ materials and surroundings that are familiar to me, using them as starting points for my investigations. These materials become the substance I use to inform the work I create.
In my use of the photographic medium, I am not specifically concerned with capturing a “concrete” reality. Instead, I aim to use photography as a medium that offers the possibility of exploring the relationship between what is visible and non-visible.”
Her work has been featured in select publications such as The New York Times Magazine (USA), Keeper of the Hearth (Amsterdam), California Sunday Magazine (USA), GUP Magazine (Amsterdam), LUX (Poland), EyeMazing (Thames and Hudson), Time Magazine (USA), and The Walrus (Canada). A monograph Stardust was produced with L’ Artiere Publishing, Italy in 2017.
Friend was selected for the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize Competition and in tandem with this was exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London (UK) in 2019. She has been selected an impressive four time (2013, 2014, 2015 and 2019) as one of the top 50 photographers in the juried Critical Mass International Photography Competition.
The images below are from the exhibition Assorted Boxes of Ordinary Life : this project was “inspired by a small, found archive of personal photographs, documents, and objects [and] considers how identity comprises both fact and fiction.” (from here)
The words of Marcie Bronson, who curated this exhibition : “Beguiling in their rich aesthetic and compelling imagery, Friend’s lush photographs and installations draw us in, and then complicate our experience of their beauty with an imperative to consider this moment and the fleeting sensations of life. At once weighty and illuminating, murky and buoyant, Friend negotiates the balance of human experience. As Friend describes, “These photographs and objects are fragments of everything and nothing.””
Much more about Friend’s artwork and ideas can be seen here.