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CUE Art Foundation: Phyllis Goldberg | Lenore Malen - 6 Sept 2007 to 13 Oct 2007 Current Exhibition |
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Phyllis Goldberg, O.O.-1 [detail], 2001, Gelatin silver print, 10 x 8 inches
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Phyllis Goldberg Curated by Jack Pierson Artist's Statement Experiments in Art 1997 to 2007 Ten years ago my work had coalesced into flat shapes that ambiguously referred to both natural and constructed forms. My painting had been questioning the making of art as (as a carrier) carriers of emotion and meaning. To investigate this, I reformulated earlier paintings made in gestural and intuitive modes, then translated elements of these images into simplified flat shapes. The use of this systematic process aided me in forging a dialogue between painterly and constructive visual language. My intention was to achieve a "presence" in the work, and to this end I would manipulate selected shapes by enlarging them, eliminating extraneous detail and reducing modulated color to flat planes. My goal was to monumentalize forms into something which ambiguously depicted nature without necessarily showing it. These mute, quietistic flat shapes in the paintings hovered at the edge of stasis. For the past few years my experiments have led me to take these quiet shapes from the darkroom and into the computer. Thus the shapes became energized. I found the results to have a jittery and nervous edge, an exciting shift in my work. It is as though the quiet forms have been placed in a centrifuge, thereby losing their central gravity as well as their gravitas. Lenore Malen Curated by Pepe Karmel Fact or Fiction? The New Society for Universal Harmony is a pastoral commune, a cult for self-improvement that espouses magnetic healing. Rooted in history and utopianism, it updates and reinvents a utopian society founded in the late l8th century by Franz Anton Mesmer that employed animal magnetism or "mesmerism" for healing and spirituality. The archives of The New Society-consisting of various prints, videos and memorabilia on display at the CUE Art Foundation-are documents of the society's rituals and re-enactments, philosophy and science. They are evidence of its material culture. History Mesmer was a late-enlightenment physician caught between paradigms. His theories were wildly incorrect, but his name still resonates. His cure-all involved the passage of "magnetic fluid" from his fingertips to a patient's body. While his followers gradually understood this phenomenon as hypnotism, Mesmerism still became a mass hysterical movement and the preeminent occult spectacle of the late l8th and l9th centuries. The New Society Members of The "New" Society call themselves "the harmonites" and a new Doctor Mesmer heads the new society. Mesmer never cures anyone, but believes that she does. All the while viewers are invited "in," not fully knowing the ground rules or even the terrain. Through the lens of the past The New Society examines enchanting systems of belief from animal magnetism to our own culture's techno-addictions. Are we all mesmerized? The New Society touches on the occult, the forces beyond the bounds of our understanding that we dismiss as dreams; it examines ritual behavior, something that we ascribe to other cultures, but do not perceive in our own. Some pictures offer the possibility of mystical union, undercut by a strong sense of the ridiculous. The work shows the lengths to which we go to believe and to belong. I've tried to construct a social utopia like the ones that existed in the past. Have we lost the capacity to imagine such a thing - that the world could be different from the one we live in? The New Society reminds us that we must laugh at what we can't attain. |
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