Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

Dara Friedman’s new digital commission, The Crowning (2021), explores the ancient and ever-renewed form of the spiral through moving images, layering, color, and sound.

Filmed on 35 mm film and transferred to video, the spiral, as both movement and shape, is engaged through the imagery depicted—the elliptical trajectory of the sun as it rises out of and sets back into the ocean; the merging of the human eye and astral bodies—but also formally, as images seamlessly transition across split frames and in subtle shifts of color and sound. With this work, Friedman foregrounds local history and alludes to how, for the Calusa, an Indigenous population of southwest Florida, the pupil was a portal to the soul. In this work, the meanings of the spiral are manifold, speaking to complex notions of nonlinear time, foldings of the past and future into the present.