“Sun Moon Stars”
sculptural installation by Berlin-based Rochelle Goldberg at CAG Contemporary Art Gallery
June 7 to September 8, 2024
CAG Contemporary Art Gallery
555 Nelson Street
Vancouver, BC
open Tuesday to Sunday from Noon to 6pm
The work of Vancouver-born, Berlin-based artist Rochelle Goldberg finds root in the unstable boundaries between seemingly fixed entities: animate and inanimate, self and other, renewal and decay. Her sculptures often merge ephemeral and enduring matter such as crude oil, bronze, glitter, steel, and seeds to enact installations that project forward and backward in time, combining art historical iconography with allusions to ongoing processes of transformation, contamination and growth.
In “Sun Moon Stars”, Goldberg continues her engagement with Mary of Egypt, a fifth-century saint who has served as a recurring point of reference in her practice. Historically framed as a repentant sinner who turned away from the carnal and material to pursue a life of scarcity in the desert, the artist recasts Mary here in dialogue with the image of another highly determined figure - the 20th-century pinup model - tracing the anachronistic frameworks that tether these icons to both one another and the present moment. The images and forms that Goldberg marshals in this scene are at once fragmentary, suspended and unfixed, pointing us toward continuous cycles of making and unmaking - material, mythical and epistemological - and to the sedimentary structures that have long shaped Western constructions of body, self and environment.
“Sun Moon Stars” (2023) was originally commissioned by Mercer Union, Toronto.
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Additional brochure text below:
As with many of Goldberg’s projects over the past several years, this installation finds its genesis in the story of Mary of Egypt, a fifth-century saint who left her worldly existence after a period of sexual “impurity” to live ascetically in the desert. Traditionally understood as an icon of repentance, Goldberg instead approaches Mary as a figure of radical empathy, someone who escaped a material world to become one with her landscape; over decades of exposure, Mary’s body would slowly become indistinguishable from her environment, until her eventual death when her corpse was found fully preserved in - and by - the desert.
This impossible passage between physical states is a vital jumping off point for “Sun Moon Stars”, with Goldberg harnessing a shifting set of temporal, formal and material references to produce a scene in a state of apparent flux. At the centre of the installation, Goldberg offers a pair of Marys in fragmentary state, each tethered to the floor with cans, their precarious figures cobbled together from a range of cast forms - vegetal matter, a pregnant torso, the face of a 20th-century pinup doll - to suggest a body in a process of decomposition or recomposition. The artist situates Mary amidst a makeshift shelter built from provisions: baguettes, a nod to the saint’s decades-long subsistence on three loaves of endlessly replicating bread; and cans cast in aluminum and bronze, the latter ruptured in form. A series of wands and vanity lights punctuate the installation, evoking both a realm of mutability and transformation, and anchoring our presence in the scene.
References to reproduction, reevaluation and renewal circulate throughout the installation both materially and conceptually, with Goldberg locating in Mary a kind of contemporary immaculate - an incorruptible body at once post-purity and post-decay, collapsing distinctions between self, other and environment. Recasting here the ancient archetype of the penitent in dialogue with the industrially produced desire associated with the mid-century pinup model, Goldberg ultimately evokes a desert of no answer, posing larger questions about how inherited structures linger, rot and recirculate.
For more information, please visit ...
cagvancouver.org/
24 июл 2024
