Eyes in the Back of the Head

Friedland’s paintings were created in a time that everything stood still, and people were hiding in their homes in fear of the pandemic outside. Friedland, a teacher by profession, returned to the school between lockdowns, and painted the classrooms, halls, yard, and ceiling. It is a gaze that looks at the familiar, mundane spaces only to find them foreign, out of time.

What does a teacher-painter, who has “eyes in the back of her head,” see? turning her eyes back, she encounters that which is absent, indicating what is missing. Now, as the pandemic subsides, we observe these paintings with a strange nostalgia; the reality of our lives just a few months ago. A situation we felt would never pass is now deconstructed in Friedland’s paintings into fragments of memory, into splinters of a gray dream.