The conclusion is nigh for Kira Freije’s steel sculptures. The pair of figures in fireworks (all performs cited, 2022) appears to be to have taken the news effectively: A person drapes a comforting hand on the other’s back as they stare out the window, complacent in just about every other’s business. Or perhaps, as the work’s title indicates, they are just experiencing the pyrotechnics with each other. In permanence of a sacred tongue, a stainless metal and forged aluminum determine of a girl bends down on a person knee, her mouth agape and her fingers clasped in prayer. Is she hoping for salvation in her ultimate moments or just dropped in venerative ecstasy? Oscillating concerning elation and trepidation, Freije’s humanoid varieties revel in the type of emotional ambiguity typically found in medieval apocalypticism.
Freije’s aesthetic fascination with the Center Ages extends beyond the poses of her subjects to the rudimentary candelabrums and censer-like lamp sculptures hanging close to the space. For functions like infallible Mariner, river by night time, and Autumn dusk, Freije has manually blown glass within of a steel body so that the content bulges from the gaps in its enclosure. The motif of the cage carries on in the anthropomorphic figures, whose barrel-like torsos bear a potent official romance to Caroline Mesquita’s hedonistic metal robots. Whereas Mesquita minimizes her kinds to mechanical shells, Freije’s intricate aluminum limbs and faces increase a diploma of tactility (and as a result humanity) to an normally inanimate armature. Her figures portend shades of our latest flirtation with the end moments, a reminder that this kind of a juncture can elicit agony and solace, usually at the very same time.
— Jonah Goldman Kay
