Jake Fried on the Soul of His Art

Q: A lot of your work is created in the physical space and then it gets digitized. What does that merging of physical and digital look like for you in your process?

JAKE FRIED: The big thing is resistance, surface resistance. When I’m working physically I can actually touch it, I can feel it. So drawing is not just a visual medium when it’s physical, it’s tactile, especially with my work because as you see, I really layer the surface and it gets very, very textural. So I just start with the physical, it’s like I’m really interacting with the object and the piece and I can just get to it better. I really love resistance when I’m drawing. I teach, most of my students work digitally. I can animate digitally. You can imagine my process being exactly the same digitally, but what it would lose would be all that character, all that nuance, all those little details, that natural shaking of the object, the shifting of the surface. You would just lose your hand in the work. If I was working digitally, I could always Control + Z and erase. 

Q: What does your initial physical process look like? 

JAKE FRIED: With my physical process, it’s one frame at a time on top of the same thing. You can never go back. I really love that I’m really destroying it forever, and physically destroying it to make the next thing. There’s something powerful about that in real physical material that you can’t replicate digitally, because you can always go back in time digitally. It’s mostly because I just want my work to do the best it can be. When I work with it digitally, it just feels like there’s a little bit of soul that’s not there. It’s almost, for me, too easy. I like a process where I have to push, fight, and embrace the materials. So, in regards to the materials that an artist uses, you’re having a conversation with it, a dance with it. It’s like you have to listen to it. It has a certain way it wants to behave. And, as an artist, I find that really useful. When you’re working digitally, you can do anything you want. The medium is so malleable that it becomes almost paralyzing I think. 

Q: With your work, there’s this cycle of creation and destruction, it’s life, it’s death. There’s laws of physics with it too, as well as the laws of space and time. What does that mean for you and your artwork? What does that symbolize if someone was less familiar with those ideas?

JAKE FRIED: Yeah, so I’ve said this before and my work is really about what time and transformation is. It’s an exploration of time itself. It’s made over a long period of time, and you can see that as you watch it. It also takes place over time. It’s this meditation on a work of art made over time, and it’s about time itself and how time evolves. I think my work is a lot about physics, the Big Bang, the beginning of the singularity of one dimension expanding out to multiple dimensions, and time is the fourth dimension. It’s like Einstein said, “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” It kind of makes sense when you think about relativity. Time is relative, space is relative, everything can be reduced down to a single, one-dimensional kind of point.

Q: How do you think your work affects your audience? 

JAKE FRIED: Time is just an extrapolation of everything. It’s all here right now. I do think my work unlocks that feeling. When you watch my work, I hope it reveals the infinite within you, or because of the weird nature of it time wise, it starts to get you to think about the divine and infinite within you, and that the time you’re experiencing right now is a bit of an illusion and all that. It is an optical illusion, it’s illusionary. It is about kind of waking you up or just kind of clicking you out of the normal human conscious state. I can draw a picture, I know what a picture is, I can see an image, but once you add the time element to it starts to become intangible and become this living breathing thing. It has a soul to it. I keep coming back to this word, soul. So, there’s something about it that’s sort of like, you can’t pin it down and it feels profound and I like that.

Q: What do you think you’ve learned during your process of moving your physical art to digital spaces?

JAKE FRIED: Most people in a museum spend just a few, less than 10 seconds, with the work of art. Just think about yourself personally, right now you’re walking through a museum or gallery, or you’re scrolling through art online, the amount of time you spend with the work of art. A lot of art that we consider good or successful is just the stuff that makes you stick and look at it for a second. Right? Longer. That’s a sign that there’s something there, right? I’ve always valued work that sort of drew me in. I’ve always valued movies and films and music that I want to go back and listen to again and then watch again.

Q: How do you mitigate the issue of holding the attention of the viewer?

JAKE FRIED: When you watch my work does feel kind of infinite and beyond time, and it sucks you in. I would almost describe it as my trick as an artist. I think if you get sucked into a work of art, you’re generally going to appreciate it or know that it impacted you. I think my work does that. I’m trying to do that with my art. A lot of people describe it as hypnotic and it’s like, well I’m not trying to hypnotize you, but I’m trying to draw you in and kind of arrest you a little bit. Clearly people can get out of it and move on with their lives too. So I always say this art is a very safe way of having a revelation or a breakthrough because it’s harmless in a lot of ways versus other life experiences.