Thinking Big
Artist duo Gabe Friedman and Denise Duong embark on their largest project yet.
WHEN DENISE DUONG and Gabriel Friedman considered potential sites for their latest sculpture collaboration, the deciding factor was simple.
“We’re like, ‘We’ll take the biggest one,’” Friedman says. “Denise and I both enjoy pushing ourselves and making bigger and weirder things.”
Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center will exhibit Duong and Friedman’s Formless Matter and Its Devastating Gesture, which will have its debut in Campbell Art Park in Oklahoma City on May 28, 2026.
This is the artists’ largest collaborative work to date, featuring six sculptures, including a nearly thirteen-foot-tall head constructed from cedar and four bird-like spheres woven from steel rods. Apertures in the head will reveal smaller scenes, and viewers will be able to step inside the bird sculptures, which range from five to twelve feet in diameter, to view interrelated metal figures.
“The perspective of the viewer changes drastically when you’re dwarfed by a thing,” Friedman says. “The idea is that you can find yourself inside the art.”
The artists often find new ideas inside works-in-progress. “The evolution of our 3-D pieces is, once Gabe has made the shape and the frame, we think it’s finished,” Duong says. “But then once we’re inside of it, we can sit in there and contemplate if this should be added to it or this should shift or move.”
The doorways through the birds in Formless Matter will lead in a direct line to the head’s open eye. The work, inspired by the artists’ five-year-old daughter, explores the human desire to create order.
“When she was an infant, she was constantly lining up grapes or pebbles or, you know, dead bugs or whatever it was,” Friedman says. “And we always found that really poignant.”
Any resemblance between the artists and the family depicted in scenes throughout the work is not entirely coincidental.
“It isn’t specifically autobiographical, but I think it’s hard to avoid connecting the dots to yourself when you’re an artist,” Friedman says.
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