Freitag's 'stretched canvases' were not canvas at all, but uncut rolls of 2 1/4" size chrome film, which each contained a single exposure along the entire strip. The images were captured using a camera that has a movable lense, a camera that was intended to produce interesting panorama-style landscape images. Mr. Freitag's results from using the camera were indeed interesting, but probably not in the way the camera's designers had intended.
On a formal level the artist pushed the possibilities of each shot from his special camera by, in addition to utilizing its movable lens, himself moving through his surroundings while the camera's exposures were being made. This yielded dreamy if not downright baroque tableaux of some alternate world. Elements within each exposure bled into one another, objects were distorted, the contours of one person's body melted seamlessly into the contours of another's. The group of photographs, each with its own lightbox so as to further heighten the Caravaggioesque coloring, seemed to project a paranoia, a fluid map of objects and place that doesn't seem to have any beginning, middle or end.
Now this sort of approach, of producing technically well executed photographs (Freitag's background is in the graphic design arts, thus his formal rigor) might only seem midly interesting given the amount of well crafted 'technical images'- to borrow from media theorist Vilem Flusser- we are exposed to on a daily basis. But what are the pictures of? Where were they taken? Upon closer inspection the viewer realizes that these surreal photographs were taken in the aisles of commercial jetliners and within the lobbies of the ubiquitous mega-hotel. Suddenly his act of documenting, the mental image of Freitag slowly working his way down a Boeing 737 aisle, photographing eveything and everyone within the late-night cabin, whether the other passangers know what he is doing or not, displaces the formal nervousness within the work. In the end the work simultaneously shows off its candy-coated aesthetics and gives the viewer a conceptual toothache.
