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This exhibition comes as a full-circle moment for the gallery’s owner, Louis Shannon. As a young kid living in lower Manhattan, Shannon first encountered Friedman’s work at Feature Inc., stumbling into awe after leaving his dad’s studio. “I would say Tom Friedman was the first artist I could ever remember by name,” Shannon commented. “The work was really legible and exciting for a young eye.” Many years later, they connected, hit it off, and “[Friedman] proposed a show within a week of [them] meeting.”

Engaging with the work, it’s easy to see why Shannon was so captivated as a child. Works like kit and kaboodle, which uses similar detritus seen on the floor of the gallery as material for a canvas, have a playful tactility that inspires exploration into every nook and cranny of the piece. There is no such thing as art, the work after which the exhibition is named, is a mobile made up of a hilariouly oversized wire hanger and fly swatter. It transforms the gallery-space into a version of the artist’s studio, where objects in various states of entropy are molded into frames. 

Many of the pieces don’t have definite dates on them, rather a span of time that reflects the length that certain objects lived in Freidman’s studio before being worked and reworked. Usages of objects and scraps that would otherwise be cast off can be seen as a visual history of process, as well as what crumbles away through banging your head against the wall trying to make something. In Friedman’s book, there’s no such thing as culture, he states that “[a]n artist’s history initially enriches, but as it builds, eventually complicates the experience of their work.” That complication is evident in the piece i do not exist, a paint-splotched chair sawed in half, placed on the wall to appear as if stuck halfway through it. 

But perhaps it’s a bit more playful than that. As Shannon commented, “for how precious the work seems, as soon as [it] comes back to his studio he likes to rework it and modify it. There’s a lack of preciousness even though he’s making really bespoke objects. Especially with the sculpture work, that became very apparent to me.”