A walk through Erector Square Open Studios last weekend unveiled all manner of visual arts—paintings, pottery, fiber, photography. The artists behind them welcomed the public into their workspaces, chatting with visitors and explaining their work, with most hoping to sell a few pieces along the way.
But the experience of walking into Jason Friedes’s studio felt different. He fabricates artwork out of reclaimed materials he finds in garbage bins and sometimes on front lawns around New Haven. Nothing inside his room was for sale. “I love to scavenge,” he says. “Being in a dumpster is one of my favorite places to be.” And while most artists have a discernible aesthetic intent behind their art, Freides’s work is more resistant to immediate appraisal—including his own. “When I’m making things, I’m sometimes like, ‘What am I doing?’” he says. “But I’m totally fine with it being different. People sometimes walk in here and don’t know what to do with [my work] and then walk out.”
The centerpiece of his studio that day was a living room set—L-shaped couch, coffee table, side table, rug—Friedes had constructed from fragments of discarded furniture: brown, black and wood-tone rectangles nailed together in perfect disharmony, with back pillows wrapped in gray upholstery or IKEA’s iconic blue shopping bags. IKEA products, whose footprints are individually light and collectively heavy, are both a favorite medium and a favorite subject. “[IKEA has] done the most to highlight the idea of the ecological costs of consumerism,” he says. “But they’re also at the epicenter of it.”
Friedes doesn’t exempt himself from a similar critique. “I struggle with the arrogance of making art, of the amount of materials required to make something that’s ultimately without use,” he says. “I’ve certainly been wasteful in my life, and maybe this is a way of reclaiming my personal profligacy and an attempt to heal humanity’s wastefulness.”
The furniture tableau carries a more intimate weight as well. “This is an exact replica of the living room I used to share with my former partner,” Friedes explains. “I wanted to give my kids a comfortable and familiar place to come that was outside the house.”
He recently split with his ex-wife, he says, and his children have indeed come to his studio to hang out in this doubly reclaimed living room. He says he began building the various pieces more than a year ago, before the idea of divorce had really taken hold. (Friedes is quick to point out that the separation was amicable: “I’m happy with the way things went, she’s happy too.”) Within this context, the living room scene takes on an entirely new resonance, surfacing my own feelings about home, family, displacement and separation.
Friedes says he wasn’t conscious of how the emotions of the breakup played into this construction. “I had to work out feelings I was having but wasn’t engaging with outside. In your living room, you’re supposed to engage with your feelings. I’m not very good at doing that out [in the world], so I brought that setting in here. But I wasn’t aware of that when I did it. It was more about the challenge of figuring out how I was going to make [the pieces].”
Once he finished and placed all the elements and sat within them, the feelings started hitting him. “Wistfulness, maybe. Things I could have done better. Ways I could have reacted better.” In seeking to “heal humanity’s wastefulness,” he may have opened a path to healing himself—and those who connect with his work—as well.
Written and photographed by Daniel Fleschner. Image 1 features Jason Friedes.
