Don Freeman Exhibition

Don Freeman’s photographs and filmmaking explore the interplay of memory, place, and imagination. Bringing together the film Tires Velvet Paws and digital prints from three photographic series—Driftwood, The Gardens of Versailles, and Branches—this exhibition considers how sustained attention can render familiar landscapes strange, intimate, and evocative.

Begun in Paris in 1991 and filmed over thirty years, Tires Velvet Paws is a forty-minute black-and-white Super 8 film inspired by André Breton’s Nadja (1928). Slow-moving tableaux and fragments of Breton’s text compose a dreamlike portrait of Paris, shaped by mood and intuition rather than conventional narrative. Freeman’s film draws on the novel’s pursuit of the marvelous within everyday experience, approaching the city as a space where observation and projection become difficult to separate. Within this framework, Nadja emerges as both a figure encountered and a presence through which the narrator’s desires and philosophical preoccupations take form.

The photographic series extend this attention to the evocative qualities of place. Made at Rolling Bay Beach on Bainbridge Island, Washington, Driftwood returns to a landscape Freeman knew as a childhood refuge. The Gardens of Versailles observes the garden’s statues in winter, while Branches, photographed in Aix-en-Provence, France, presents a botanical study of branching forms. Across these works, natural structures and sculpted figures invite close consideration of surface, gesture, and the passage of time.

Don Freeman’s photographs and filmmaking explore the interplay of memory, place, and imagination. Bringing together the film Tires Velvet Paws and digital prints from three photographic series—Driftwood, The Gardens of Versailles, and Branches—this exhibition considers how sustained attention can render familiar landscapes strange, intimate, and evocative.

Begun in Paris in 1991 and filmed over thirty years, Tires Velvet Paws is a forty-minute black-and-white Super 8 film inspired by André Breton’s Nadja (1928). Slow-moving tableaux and fragments of Breton’s text compose a dreamlike portrait of Paris, shaped by mood and intuition rather than conventional narrative. Freeman’s film draws on the novel’s pursuit of the marvelous within everyday experience, approaching the city as a space where observation and projection become difficult to separate. Within this framework, Nadja emerges as both a figure encountered and a presence through which the narrator’s desires and philosophical preoccupations take form.

The photographic series extend this attention to the evocative qualities of place. Made at Rolling Bay Beach on Bainbridge Island, Washington, Driftwood returns to a landscape Freeman knew as a childhood refuge. The Gardens of Versailles observes the garden’s statues in winter, while Branches, photographed in Aix-en-Provence, France, presents a botanical study of branching forms. Across these works, natural structures and sculpted figures invite close consideration of surface, gesture, and the passage of time.