“ I. “Destroying matter’s identity doesn’t destroy it,” SOPHIE-FRIEDMAN PAPPAS writes. The artist is talking about a horse who tugged an anarchist’s bomb down to the New York stock exchange and whose exploded limbs were turned to glue. But she’s also talking about, or maybe talking through, firing a brick in a kiln, a kiln fired so hot it becomes a sculpture itself. Identity stutters like light flickers through a camera obscura, pulverizing like dust from drywall coming down in commercial real estate as it’s converted into Airbnbs rentable for any sexual fantasy. Drawn to waste, accident, and re-appropriation, Friedman-Pappas treats all history as historical fiction destined, like us, for disappearance.

Friedman-Pappas starts from the residue, remnant, or remainder to generate forms that are not “final” but both enact and represent a frozen moment of an object’s production. The sculptures in this exhibition are part of Friedman-Pappas project Buda’s Horse. The elements of the project, including these two works, sublimate her historical detective work into subjects as seemingly disparate as: the 1920 Wall Street bombing attributed to Mario Buda; Lacan’s fixation on upholstery; a single possibly 119-year-old brick fused with plate shards in a San Francisco historical society that serves as a relic to the Great Fire of 1906; Cycladic dovecotes. The resulting sculptures combine ceramic, metal grates, magnifying glasses, bricks, and burners into assemblages that dissolve any distinctions between inside and outside, before and after, or constructed and demolished. ”