The title “Everything we broke today needed breaking anyway” harnesses the mood of Nancy Friedland’s paintings, a series that catches and reveals the rhythms of a family in motion. The words are lyrics from a plaintive song by folk ensemble This is the Kit. As the scaffolding of Friedland’s achingly intimate studies, they bring to mind a nursery rhyme murmured in a baby’s ear, or an incantation a teenager repeats to herself, eyes closed, after a bad family dinner ends in smashed dishes. In a family, as in life, the breaking is inevitable and the mending is imperative, and so these are the right words to accompany us into the generous world of the artist.
It’s a specific place. Friedland, who began her career as a photographer, works from her own photographs of her family. The setting is her parents’ lakeside cottage in northern Ontario, Canada. In the anchor painting of the house at night, the outside darkness is kept at bay by the inside fire, and a puddle of light outside the front door is an invitation. Come in. Right here, in this place, time will pass, people will come and go. And yet, taking in the paintings as a group, the specificity gives way to a generalized summer feeling: this is Friedland’s world but also a holiday of the imagination. These people, dependent and interdependent, are familiar to anyone ever caught in the sticky web of family dynamics. I am reaching for you across the bed in the lamplight. I am escaping all of you by jumping in this lake, holding my breath under water (but offering a thumbs-up, so don’t worry).
Placed next to one another, the paintings almost function like the frames of a film, pushing a story along. In the first light, a little outboard motor boat moves across the water’s unbroken surface. Two figures in the boat are cradled in the centre of the painting by the pinkening sky above, a reflective slab below. Perhaps something profound is being passed between generations—or did I bring that story? Is fishing at dawn such an archetypal snapshot that I’ve imposed my own meaning? The artist doesn’t say, and the paintings only tease, flicking at our commonality, providing less information than Friedland’s previous work. Even the brush strokes are thicker, less descriptive; the palate simplified to greeny greys, blues and pinks. The effect is a kind of suppleness that shows the way memory can be both vivid and faint at once. Friedland is giving her subjects more space now: a child’s bare back in the sunlight, strong but vulnerable, fills almost the entire field of vision. The viewer is trusted to fill in the details and bring her own fellow feeling to this summer day.
When family is the subject, the danger for any artist is the phoniness of nostalgia. Consider the word “anemoia”: a yearning for something that never existed. Yet Friedland’s paintings –beautifully shaggy– are a bulwark against the idealised family portrait. Where there is love, there is also tension. A young man sets himself apart, sneaks outside for a nighttime smoke, inhaling angrily. A sad daughter’s face takes up the canvas. She casts her eyes down, rests her head on her folded hands, chin pressing against the letters of her friendship bracelet. The plastic bracelet is sweet and dissonant; a child’s object on a young woman’s body. You can almost hear the retort right after the invasive camera clicks: “Mom, don’t.” A portrait of growing up, and away.
Because in a family, someone is always leaving. On a field of grass, a boy curls up with his beloved dog. For children, pets are lessons in mortality, practice for the unavoidable losses ahead. On the sun-dappled grass where they lie together, light advances and retreats. Friedland’s characters are caught often in the penumbra, a place of partial illumination. The ones we love, as they grow and age, are moving perpetually between light and dark. On Friedland’s family island, the ordinary world of the living contains the shadows of the next one. Her paintings are a rebuke to the way time goes. Each image stops right between this fleeting moment and the next, and fixes us there to wonder and revel in the air and light. But just because a scene –or a person– is familiar doesn’t mean it’s known. And so Friedland nudges us to look again, at her tender paintings and the ones we love, in the hopes we may get close enough to see.
Katrina Onstad
March 2025
Harper's Magazine, November 2025
NADA Miami 2024 w/ La Loma Gallery
People always say that they are “thrilled to announce… blah blah blah” but I really am THRILLED TO ANNOUNCE my participation in NADA MIAMI with La Loma Gallery from Los Angeles. I will be showing new works alongside the lovely and talaented Ryan Dobrowski in booth C 301.
Come see us at Ice Palace Studios, 1400 N Miami Ave, Miami FL 33136. Opening will take place on Tuesday, Dec 3rd. VIP Hours: 10 am - 4 pm. Public Hours: 4 - 7 pm.
Request a preview from anastasija@lalomaprojects.com or kirk@lalomaprojects.com
Nancy Friedland, Blink, 2024 Acrylic on wood panel, 40” x 30”
Artwork Photo by LF Documentation
ARCADE | Koffler Arts Article
Discovering a Room You Didn’t Know Existed
Arcade speaks with Toronto artist Nancy Friedland on what drove her mid-career transition from conceptual photography to painting, and how the anticipation of grief lay at the heart of much of her work.
By Chris Frey, August 20, 2024
Nancy Friedland in her Toronto studio (Photo: Rylan Perry)
“Basically, all of this is a bit of a midlife crisis,” says Nancy Friedland, gesturing at the collection of new paintings mounted on the wall of the fourth-floor studio space she shares in downtown Toronto. “I wanted to get back to messing with the surface of the image,” she adds. “I don’t know how or why, but I knew that I needed to get physical with whatever I was going to start making again.”
Exhibition: I Wish I Had a River
smoke the moon (Santa Fe, NM) marks the advent of summer with I Wish I Had a River, a solo exhibition of new work by Toronto based painter Nancy Friedland. Friedland’s paintings rush forward in a wellspring of emotion, alchemizing small moments into glimmers of tenderness.
Read MoreCBC Arts Article
What does it mean to be a 'recovering photographer'?
Nancy Friedland's startling photo-like paintings capture something her camera never could
Chris Hampton · CBC News · Posted: Feb 21, 2024 4:27 PM EST
Over two decades, Nancy Friedland built her career in art as a photographer. She was represented by a respected Toronto gallerist, she won grants and her work attracted collectors. Then, suddenly, she found she couldn't take another picture — not as art, at least.
Her photography was always "clever" and conceptual, she says, like a traditional portrait series where potted plants assumed the role of the sitter. But when Friedland embarked on a rather personal, and therefore, uncharacteristic photo project about her family — positioning them as the stars of her own sky — something shifted inside of her.
"It just felt so much better to say something directly than the wink and nudge of my earlier practice," she says. "Once I found that genuine connection with my work, I just wanted to take it even further … [Photography] was like a completed journey."
NYC: Sonya Gallery group show
Sonya Gallery in New York City
New Paintings, curated by Jack Chase & Dylan Siegel
November 9 - December 9, 2023
Opening Reception: November 9, 6-9pm
Solstice, 24 x 30 inches, acrylic on wood panel
Art Toronto Selection: smoke the moon gallery
Art Toronto 2023
You can find my work at smoke the moon’s booth with feature artist Emma White
October 5, 2023
The New York Review of Books
Podcast feature: My Art is Real
“Nancy made art for many years but her career took off after she stopped caring about other’s opinions and became Real. Join Jacob as we discover why Nancy Friedland switch from photography to painting and changed her life.”
Gravity, 2022, 24. 30 inches, acrylic on wood panel
Stay cool
If I search my archived emails with the subject “Harper’s”, I find a succinct little exchange with the assistant art director of 10 years ago. I had submitted a series of photographs from the series VIGIL that I thought might make some clever illustrations for the ever erudite magazine. The work was politely rejected, or to be more precise: “we’ll be in touch”. I mean, I wasn’t waiting around for them to call or anything, but I was thrilled when I heard that they were interested in publishing 3 of my paintings to accompany The Return, a Joyce Carol Oates short story in the August issue. They chose one of my very favourite paintings too.
Lots of other exciting things to tell you about:
My first painting show I’m Looking Through You in Pasadena, California with a great gallery called La Loma Projects (lalomaprojects.com). I also have work in Les Canadiennes with some of my favourite lady painters from north of the 49th parallel at Gallery b (gallerybgallery.com) in Castine, Maine where I hope to find myself painting in residence by the cold ocean some summer soon, when the undertow of family life is not quite so strong.
Two exciting Toronto things coming in October:
My work will be in Art Toronto 2023 with smoke the moon gallery (smokethemoon.com) from Santa Fe, New Mexico and Roadtripping in my Mind #75 will be available at auction for Art with Heart, (artwithheart.ca) the prestigious fundraiser for Casey House.
Roadtripping in My Mind #75, 2022, 30 x 40 inches, acrylic on wood panel. Available through Casey House Art with Heart 2023 auction.
2024 will be very busy with solo shows in LA and Santa Fe, a couple of art fairs and group shows. In the meantime, I hope it’s not too hot where you are, or too wet or too cold. I hope that you are able to find joy in the small things and that you have some time by a lake or an ocean or a pond, and you get the chance to be with the people that you love.
Stay cool,
Nancy