Some Hags

"High above Martha Friedman's three-piece exhibition 'Some Hags' is a seventeenth-century Flemish tapestry that depicts the moment after Circe used her magic to turn Odysseus's men into swine. Freaked out and pissed off, Odysseus looms like a hulk behind the sorceress, sword in hand, as she sits before a large book. It is one likely source of her power, a tome of spells that Friedman renders as the sculptural Circe's Book (all works 2016), an enormous, odd, and interactive collection of elastic pages on a table below, its sticky-smooth rubber sheaths requiring some strength to turn. The work riffs off different sections of the tapestry, from the brandished weapon to the pattern of the weaving itself." — Yin Ho, Artforum Critic's Picks