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By Cate McQuaid | GLOBE CORRESPONDENT OCTOBER 13, 2015

It’s easy to get caught up in the sheer phenomenology of Georgie Friedman’s increasingly ambitious video installations, but there’s more to them than that. Her newest one, “Eye of the Storm,” at Roberts Gallery in Lesley University’s Lunder Arts Center, leads you through a dark room around skewed and undulating screens, over which clouds rush and whirl.

Then you step into a vortex. A funnel-shaped screen surrounds you, and clouds tumble by at a ferocious rate. Audio, which Friedman composed with Jere Friedman, moans quietly, then grows commanding. You’re not on the ground, pummeled by rain and wind, but aloft at the still, charged center of the spiraling storm.

I stood for a few minutes, absorbing the drama, processing climate-change anxiety, and feeling small yet godlike in my placement amid the black-and-white clouds. Only then did I notice how they softened, then spiked, and suddenly their motion and form appeared to be the quick work of a giant, ink-soaked brush, painting around me.

Friedman often uses sky and weather scenes to refer to basic building blocks of art. Witness her “Sky Study, No.1,” down the street in Lesley’s VanDernoot Gallery. Three screens depict a rectangle of sky in a way that echoes work by light artist James Turrell. They’re side by side, and the mere juxtaposition thrusts them into abstraction. The hint of a grid, patterns of color and form: Blue, gray, gray with a pale orb.

Each screen slowly shifts. The contemplative pace may lull you into thinking nothing much will happen. Then something does, and eye and mind reorient, sorting out the new relationships, the new whole. It’s candy for the mindful viewer.

Friedman breaks weather down, manipulating it as if it were a few color swatches or brushstrokes, even as she plugs into the elemental power it has over us as critters on this earth.

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More information:

GEORGIE FRIEDMAN: Eye of the Storm

At Roberts Gallery, Lunder Arts Center, Lesley University, 1801 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge,

and VanDernoot Gallery, University Hall, Lesley University, 1815 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge,

through Nov. 1. 617-349-8010, www.lesley.edu/college-art-and-design

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FULL ARTICLE: http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2015/10/13/weather-worship-and-whimsy/xgPnuoss9E9GejMPbDGkYO/story.html

GALLERIES

Weather, worship, and whimsy

CAMBRIDGE (CBS) – The eye of a hurricane is placed to scale in the Lunder Arts Center at Lesley University for all to experience.

“It’s kind of intense,” says student Cody Huntington.

“Yeah it’s really like, it’s got a weird overwhelming feel to it and I think the ambient noise really affects it too,” says Scott Bausemer, also a student.

Georgie Friedman is the artist behind the piece titled “Eye of the Storm,” a video installation that references the shape of a hurricane’s eye.

Inside the ‘Eye of the Storm’ exhibit at Lesley University. (WBZ-TV)

She says a lot of research went into the creation. She was mainly inspired by the way her friends and family on the Gulf Coast were affected by Hurricane Katrina.

“I just started thinking it could have been me, but it wasn’t. And sort of how these storms affect us. Also the fact that they’re just storms, and it’s just weather. And they’re doing what it does. They don’t mean to cause all this harm, but they just cross our paths. And then it’s sort of devastating,” says Friedman.

“It’s a really serene and interesting experience here,” says student Cameron Grant.

“I want them to think a little bit about maybe both our physical and psychological relationship to these large storms. Where they are, in some ways, just aesthetically beautiful if you can look at it objectively,” says Friedman.

There was a three-week installation period for this whole piece to come together, with 10-hour work days and a few assistants from the gallery to hang the cloth and wires. The videos time-lapse between 15 and 30 minutes, and there is an overall ambient sound projected through the room. The piece is laid out so people can take their own paths through the storm to find different views.

This is Friedman’s largest indoor sculptural exhibit, although she has done several outside pieces on buildings.

The “Eye of the Storm” exhibit runs through November 1st in the Roberts Gallery in the Lunder Arts Center. Other exhibits from the artist (video studies of snow and the sky) are currently displayed in the Vandernoot Gallery in University Hall, also through November 1st.

For more information on the galleries and exhibits, visit lesley.edu

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Pamela Gardner is the weekend morning meteorologist for WBZ-TV News.

"Eye Of The Storm" Exhibit Brings You Into Eye Of A Hurricane

By Pamela Gardner, WBZ-TV | October 2, 2015 5:41 PM

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