Sarajo Frieden
I work from a studio in Los
Angeles that borders Thai
Town, Little Armenia and
Koreatown, with Guatemalan and Salvadoran bakeries nearby. The cacophony of
hand-painted signs in a variety of languages serves as both inspiration and
daily reminder that the ordinary is often extraordinary and nothing is what it
seems. A host of disparate vocabularies from the worlds of fine, folk and
decorative art, including Persian miniatures, Shaker trance drawings, Japanese
ukiyo-e, and my Hungarian great aunt’s embroidery, can be found wandering
through my images. Using open ended narratives, folk tales, abstraction and the
juxtaposition of discordant images, I try to give form to the human experience
as I see it. My work has been exhibited in galleries in Los
Angeles, San Diego, North Carolina, Minnesota,
New York, Rome,
Venice, Naples
and Australia.