New York, NY – With the release of his Genesis NFT “Raw Data”, contemporary artist and graphic animator
Jake Fried amplifies the walls of
Superchief Gallery NFT with a solo exhibition of motion paintings and ancient revelry, Maximum Effort: Out of Nothing, Into Nothing. Opening on Saturday July 10th and on view through July 16th, his latest body of work reflects on the recent boom of Big Tech and Blockchain as a fluid organism of collective consciousness. The exhibition, which serves as Fried’s debut solo outing with the gallery, offers both critique and celebration of a post-lockdown world in which virtual life has become eerily quotidian.
Sifting through the psyche’s shifting relationship to technology and the transhuman, Fried is a process-focused artist whose frenzied, stream-of-conciousness hand-drawn works are the result of a daily ritual drawing practice. Rendered in ink, white-out, gouache and sometimes even coffee, the Boston-based artist reworks the same drawing up to thousands of times, in what amounts to a moving painting.
A formally trained artist, Jake’s stellar accolades include showing his experimental films at the Tate Modern and Sundance Film Festival alongside contract work for Adult Swim and Netflix. A multidisciplinary maker who shifted the course of animation with his uniquely rhythmic shorts, Fried’s more recent foray into the NFT game reflects an effort to shore up a more direct and sustainable revenue stream for creators. He is a bridge for a generation of nimble animators who intend to up the ante on the reception of their work in the Fine Art context. Amidst the contemporary circus of avatars and cyber jamboree, Fried’s short looping animations fuse timeless nirvana with digital discord – ultimately revealing the singularity between user and technology.
Two additional NFTs will be minted as editions based on the 5 second looping ink and white out on paper animations Still Life with Lemons (for Margot) and Goodnight Moon (Patterns for Margot). Made within the first couple years of his daughter’s life, these two pieces reflect Fried’s shift in work rhythm to include teaching his University classes remotely from home while Fathering. With classic children’s lit firing up the synapses, we find Fried’s mark making practice radically attuned to his 19-month old’s feeding and nap patterns.