Brenda Goodman, Mala Iqbal, Angela Dufresne: 3 friends
Wells Chandler September 7. 2025
Installation view of Brenda Goodman, Mala Iqbal, Angela Dufresne: 3 friends at 1053 Gallery Fleischmanns, NY (photo Manal Abu-Shaheen)
Jim Henson’s 1977 holiday classic Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas is a parable about love, creativity, and the joy of relationships that make life meaningful. The heartfelt story culminates with a talent contest. Wendell Porcupine, Harvey Beaver, and Charlie Muskrat assembled by Emmet Otter, form the Frogtown Hollow Jubilee Jug Band. As it goes, their performance, luminous and sincere, is overshadowed by the flashy, Riverbottom Nightmare Band. But in the end, that loss does not matter, because what they made was real. Their cooperation and effort touched each other, gave voice to care, and opened the heart. In this light, a stone's throw from the center of the art world, Fleischmanns, NY becomes its own Frogtown Hollow, a quaint town in the Catskills with a rustic spirit. Likewise, the upstate exhibition 3 friends at 1053 Gallery featuring the work of Angela Dufresne, Brenda Goodman, and Mala Iqbal, centers the importance of friendships in sustaining a longstanding art career and celebrates the gratification of creating both alongside and within a community.
Brenda Goodman, “Self Portrait 54” (2006) oil, wood, paper mache on wood 29 x 30 inches (detail)
The exhibition and the film both echo the Gift of the Magi motif; individual sacrifice results in something more meaningful to one another. In Jug-Band Christmas, Emmet and his Ma give up their respective tools, not knowing the other is doing the same, to support each other’s dreams. Their acts of love cancel each other’s plans, but reveal something truer: love itself is the gift, not the prize it helps acquire. Similarly, 3 friends prioritizes collaboration and relational care – queer feminist strategies of survival – and in doing so dismantles the lonely modernist myth of the hermetic genius. 3 friends foregrounds the reality that artists do not emerge from a vacuum. We live entangled lives, our work is informed and enhanced by each other. Making kin is part of staying with the trouble.
Brenda Goodman, Angela Dufresne, Mala Iqbal “Sap Stalk Scion” (2025) oil on wood with branch 60 x 72 inches
The exhibition features collaborative works and individual ones. Rife with Pinecrone proverbs, a video shot by Linda Dunne, Goodman’s partner of forty plus years, documents the artists collaboratively painting Sap Stalk Scion 2025. Subverting the dominant narrative of capitalist achievement Dufresne states, “There is only one thing less economically valuable than a painting done by two lesbians –it’s a painting done by three lesbians.” The artists egg each other on, “Go get em tiger.” They negotiate boundaries. Iqbal claps back at Goodman’s bossiness, “If I want to put a figure in somewhere else, I’m going to put a figure in somewhere else.” Dufresne, known widely to be a painting bottom, gladly follows Goodman’s commands. Thirty years older than her partnered collaborators Goodman teases, “Why are you so neutral? Be Bold!” After painting out another’s contribution she mischievously confirms, “Still friends?” Adaptation, reciprocity, and compromise are germinal to mutuality. The joy of performing together—of blending voices, of making space for each other’s strengths and idiosyncrasies—is the heart of both Jug-Band Christmas and Sap Stalk Scion 2025. Both confirm the point is not about winning; it is about resonating together.
Angela Dufresne “Down by the River-Relations Between City and Town and Its Related Non-Spiritual Cults” (2012-2024) oil on canvas, wood 87 x 45 inches
Dufresne, Goodman, and Iqbal defy strict categorization integrating abstraction, figuration, and narrative across the trajectory of their work and in relation to each other. And why not, because after all who are the parasitic speculative sycophants who benefit from such divisions and reductive taxonomies — gatekeeping critics, derivative curators, calcified academics, clueless dealers, or limited collectors? Separation is violence —the seeds of alienation in systems of autocratic control. Our call as artists is to expand or at least resist conforming to the structures of normativity. These three artists do exactly that.
Brenda Goodman, “Covid Time” (2021) oil, mixed media on wood 12 x 16 inches + (side view)
My favorite painting in the exhibition titled Covid Time 2021 features a solitary waterfowl by Goodman. Capturing a profound sense of alienation and introspection, an ashen duck –literally depressed into its environment– is suspended locked between frozen ice, a birch tree, and a nebulous dark winter sky. A kissing cousin to David Lynch, its taijitu structure possesses a haunting stillness. Reflecting existential uncertainty and disconnection from the world around him, I am reminded of Holden Caulfield’s preoccupation with the ducks in Central Park in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Doubling as abstract pain cairns, zips of red, yellow, and blue pulsate beneath the density of Goodman’s bleak world. Repeatedly playing with duality, the cracks of primary colors scarring the surface of the painting summons the Kabbalistic concept of Ohr, a special kind of light that is forged in darkness. The words of the 13th-century Sufi mystic and poet Rumi reverberate thematically across Goodman’s oeuvre, “The wound is the place where the light enters you.”
Installation view of Angela Dufresne, Brenda Goodman, Mala Iqbal, 3 friends at 1053 Gallery
In the catalog text for the exhibition, the art historian Dr. Ksenia M. Soboleva notes, “The artists’ distinct approaches don’t merge into a seamless whole but rather create a dynamic conversation where differences generate new possibilities.” In relation to one another, formal qualities anchor the show through spatially expansive passages of color and light enhancing the drama in each other’s work in exciting ways. A corner of the gallery featuring all three artists demonstrates this recurring phenomenon. In what appears to be a hilarious nod to Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert, the sublime yellow sky in Dufresne’s painting Down by the River-Relations Between City and Town and Its Related Non-Spiritual Cults 2012-2024 morphs into a psychologically charged jaundice background in Goodman’s Untitled Self Portrait 4 2005 painting. A tortured soul with viscous white taffy skin seems to have recently experienced the misfortune of becoming a cyclops. Span to the right, in Iqbal’s Audience 2024, spectral gossiping movie goers with ethereal blue hair frame a bag of popcorn with their secrets. Color and spatial proximity suggest Goodman’s melting figure is in fact a sentient popped kernel of corn. Melted butter slowly dissolves their psyche. Appetite’s dissociative touch transfixed by the enchanted haze of a lilac feature is the cause of their inner and outer distortion. The nuclear afterglow in Dufresne’s landscape reinforces this psycho-spiritual drama. A result of strong curation, serendipitous narratives punctuate the exhibition.
Brenda Goodman “Untitled SP-4” (2005) oil on wood, 35 x 30 inches + Mala Iqbal “Audience” (2024) oil on canvas, 35 x 23 inches
Figures and materials shapeshift in unexpected ways from one painting to the next. A vigilant woman and her watchful dog, holding paw and hand, look out for one another in Iqbal’s When We First Met (Primeval Best Friends) 2024. Displaced, Iqbal’s preoccupied companions attempt to return to a late prehistoric era but are distracted by external factors. Installed next to each other, Iqbal’s post fall painting rhymes thematically with Goodman’s Self Portrait 54 2006, also featuring an expulsion scene. Two red figures appear to aid Brenda as she crosses over a yellow papier-maché guardrail that resembles a trompe l’oeil stick, bridging her paintings materially with Dufresne.
Mala Iqbal “When We First Met (Primeval Best Friends)” (2024) oil on canvas 22 x 18.5 inches + Brenda Goodman “Self Portrait 54” (2006) oil, wood, paper mache on wood 29 x 30 inches
Dufresene’s hyper-frames are mycelial meta-devices structuring the show. Several of her paintings are framed within wooden structures she meticulously constructs herself, crafted from twigs, branches, and plywood. In this context her paintings become fruiting bodies emerging from decomposing logs, symbolizing regeneration and the interconnectedness of all life forms. Suggesting nesting, shelters, dams, and antlers, the frames are extensions of the paintings themselves, blurring the lines between the artwork and its environment as a gesture of kinship. This presentation choice simultaneously conveys that the point of painting is to be a mushroom, while positioning the artist as a collaborative and reparative organism within a larger ecological system.
Angela Dufresne “Robin Egg” (2023) oil on canvas on wood 20 x 19 inches
The art world is having an identity crisis. Reiterated by the acts of a fascist regime, the shuttering of powerful galleries echoes a deeper operative pattern. Bloat is a sign of decay. Fatigue, collapse, and burnout are real consequences of a hollow existence devoid of depth, healing, and real connection. Fear eats the soul, as does greed and scarcity. We were taught as children that mediocrity hides behind smoke screens and curtains to cloak impotence. Exploiting the illusion of binary systems is the easiest way to manipulate and control a population. Collectively we are experiencing the contractions of polarity pointing to something more profound. The ghost of Carl Jung is coming for you darling –howling ‘Get off my train’ and individuate, or cling to a rotting ego in the illusion of separateness trapped in a flaccid meat suit of decay. Dufresne, Goodman, and Iqbal’s collaborative approach provides a fresh holistic alternative through cooperative design for better living. Just like the harmony of Ma Otter and the Frogtown Hollow Jubilee Jugband, 3 friends is the medium and the massage.
Installation view of Angela Dufresne, Brenda Goodman, Mala Iqbal: 3 friends at 1053 Gallery Fleischmanns, NY
Angela Dufresne, Brenda Goodman, Mala Iqbal: 3 friends at 1053 Gallery (1053 Main St, Fleischmanns, NY 12430) through September 7.