Al Freeman works in several dimensions focusing on form and shape, systematically dissecting the meaning of images and the connection between what is seen and what is understood.
In her Soft Sculptures, Freeman enlarges the mundane, sewing together vinyl and stuffing it with polyfil until it is perfectly recognizable but entirely different. Her requirement for enlargement is that each object must be one that can be identified from form and color alone. For instance, a torn Alka-Seltzer package, or a six-outlet surge protector. Hard, sharp objects are rendered soft: iPhones, knives, pills, and genitalia feature in her oeuvre. By faithfully recreating these objects in a pillow-like texture that invites touch, or even a cuddle, she strips these cultural touchstones of their fierceness. Their flaccid and sagging lines are a humorous re-appraisal of masculinity and its trappings.

In her Comparisons, Al Freeman juxtaposes famous works of art with found images from the far reaches of the internet. Often amateur photographs of drunken hijinks or pop-culture ephemera, the grittier imagery often has to do with the culture of, as the artist puts it, "the unchecked bad behavior that's associated with men". These juvenile pranks and hazing rituals relate either in concept or form to their art historical touchstones. Paintings by Matisse or Warhol which are lauded for their conceptualization and execution find facsimile with the endless caches of user-generated content on the internet. Freeman draws a through-line of societal permissiveness of bad behavior between Modernist male artists and the young men of the internet age. These Comparisons embody a vernacular of high and low, images relating elliptically to one another, each proving the other to be true.

For LISTE, Al Freeman presents both Comparisons and Soft Sculpture. Each Soft Sculpture is stitched and stuffed, and the compositions are painterly, owing to Freeman's MFA in Painting from Yale. Work with textiles by women artists, though one of the oldest artforms in the world, is underrepresented in every historical context, and Freeman's playful juxtaposition of this historically feminine medium and her highly masculine subject matter is at the core of her conceptual practice. Indeed, even her Comparisons are a mirroring of the means by which we have learned to confer value on the visual.

In both her Comparisons and Soft Sculptures, Freeman will prioritize trompe l'oeil, carefully replicating objects in vinyl, and situating her images on corkboard, as if straight from a notebook. Seemingly slap-dash, the display of these images in artist-fabricated frames encourages the viewer to see the humor first. Freeman disarms the viewer with her approachable method of installation before employing rigorous art historical principals and formal analysis, transforming funny and cute subjects into sites ripe for deconstruction and interpretation.

Freeman's sculptures rely on modes of thought that surround status in western contemporary art and the histories that have produced these styles of thinking. She is concerned with the ways in which perception is altered based on context. Freeman's presentation for LISTE 2025 does the same: her sculptures and comparisons conceal and reveal a skillful reconceptualization of value.

Note: All images are preliminary mock-ups