Time to Be Happy | Jake Fried
Using ink and white-out to generate hallucinatory vistas, Jake Fried repeatedly modifies and records his images to create mind-bending animations. Fried’s films have been auctioned at Christie’s, exhibited at the Tate Modern and Sundance Film Festival, and commissioned by Adult Swim, Netflix, and numerous art galleries around the world.
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What inspired you to become an artist? The Detroit Industry Murals by Diego Rivera. I remember being blown away by this work when I was 6 years old growing up in Detroit and visiting the art museum. The scale, details and intensity - the intermixing of ancient/symbolic imagery with modern life/technology. That overwhelming power and vision that an artwork can convey certainly inspired me in profound ways as a young person.
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What was the first artwork you sold? I’ve been selling my drawings and paintings for over 20 years, since I was in middle school. It’s hard to remember the very first actual sale, but here’s a painting that was probably one of them, “Business Man”. Clearly inspired by Basquiat, it still hints at the expressionism and movement I continue to explore in my work to this day. - Age 15
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What was the most meaningful piece you created? I spend up to a year reworking the same drawing over and over again to create my 1-minute animations, these are my most important and meaningful pieces. My most recent 1-minute piece “Open Eyes” is currently the most meaningful to me and was a big inspiration for my “Time To Be Happy” design.
Every piece I make feels one step closer to distilling my vision and pushing the limits of what the moving image can be, so my newest work always tends to be the most meaningful to me. Using the central image of the eye throughout, "Open Eyes" focuses on the central themes that I address in my work - looking deeper, heightened awareness, spiritual enlightenment, self discovery, the incredible depth and complexity of consciousness. Likewise, my "Time To Be Happy" clock reinforces and builds on these themes. For me, art-making is a discovery process, my work reveals itself over a long time, frame by frame, without any predetermined outcome. When it's really going well, it feels like I'm not actually making the work, but channeling something deeper through me. My 'artistic journey' has been one of pushing myself to "open my eyes wider, to see deeper and more clearly, to wake up and see the truth - to seek revelations that slowly reveal themselves over time through intense labor and reflection." As an animator and visual artist, I am an illusionist, I am hacking the eyes and brains of my viewers to create experiences that go beyond just sight, but "seeing" in a grander sense of the word.
- Share your experience creating the Clock. The work I'm famous for - I scan a photograph, then I work on top of it with whiteout and ink. Most of my collectors and fans have never seen the physical before. Wow, I can show people what the work looks like in real life?
it's a physical thing but it's only a digital object. A few of us digital artists are coming back into physicals now having established a career in the digital space. Now that I'm aging, it's about getting it into collections and having it preserved.
I'm a physical artist. I started as a painter. I kept reworking my paintings and photographing the evolution of the painting over time. But my work the last decade has been digital videos... I have removed physical objects from my work. When I'm done with a piece, there's nothing left, no evidence of a process. Having this piece sitting behind me the past week, it's a different experience and been enlightening for me as an artist.
The physical act of moving an 80 pound object up and down and having to draw at all angles... I like that. I miss that physicality in my normal process.
Just like my animations, I wanted it to lead me where it wanted to go.
My work's about time and movement. It takes a year to make my pieces into 1 minute films. We're playing with what time is, so having it be a clock is so on-point.
Time to Be Happy... my work is usually pretty intense. Happiness is such an interesting quality to bring to my work. I tried to think about it as this figure transcending time itself, where the in/out punch breaks free to the human spirit breaking free.
It's about revelation and transcendance. When I make something, it's like being touched by God. My journey as an artist is like messages from above and translating it.
It's like a fortune teller machine. There's something magnetic about it.
To have communion with an object that's this old. I'm thinking, I don't want to f*ck this up, I have to respect this thing. A big thrill of my work is what's going to last 100 years? Everything is disposable. This thing had enough cultural value to stick around for 100 years. To add something to it to make it last another 100 years, in a new context? I'm down with that.
Clock includes this NFT and 90 minutes of visual video art featuring 50 artists captured by Benzi.