Genevieve Goffman at Halsey McKay Gallery, New York

Halsey McKay Gallery is pleased to present Far Away, an exhibition of new works by Genevieve Goffman, marking her first solo presentation with the gallery. Goffman is a New York based artist who explores narrative, history, and fantasy through digital modeling, 3D printing, and collage. Goffman’s architectural constructions examine the tensions between imagined utopias and historical trauma, translating complex research into materially exquisite, speculative objects. Far Away reflects Goffman’s continued fascination with how built environments encode ideologies, serve as vessels of control or refuge, and function as both monuments and miniatures of civilization’s persistent paradox.

In Far Away, three meticulously crafted sculptures invite viewers into intricately imagined worlds that explore contradictions between utopia and dystopia, destruction and rebirth, isolation and community, fantasy and decay. Drawing from distinct historical narratives, Goffman’s work con-structs symbolic architectural pathways, vehicles, and environments that function as portals—each leading into a speculative dialogue on memory, ideology, and time.

The exhibition’s genesis lies in Far Away, the Arches of the Monastery Looked Fragile Enough to Snap Like a Chicken’s Wishbone, inspired by a story of French monks who continued producing wine in monastic seclusion throughout the upheavals of the 20th century. This sculpture becomes a meditation on temporal stasis and preservation, questioning whether time is suspended—or re-leased—as ancient structures crumble. Goffman explores the aesthetic and philosophical tension between the austere conservatism of Gothic monastic architecture and the ornate aspiration of cathedrals, assembling these themes through a combination of sculptural form and collage.

In Far Away, Smoke Billowed Up Where the Tree Line Met the Bare Cliff, Goffman delves into the layered, haunting history of Saint Joachimsthal (now Jáchymov), a Czech-German mining town transformed by uranium extraction, scientific optimism, and the horror of wartime exploitation. The town’s evolution—from silver mining village to radiation-contaminated ghost town—becomes the setting for a fairy-tale vision embedded with toxic beauty and creeping ruin.

The third major work, Far Away, the Alpine City Glimmered, Light Reflecting Off Its Golden Turrets and the Icy Mountain Peaks, envisions a fantasy health spa infused with the spirit of early 20th-century radium resorts and visionary architect Bruno Taut’s utopian Alpine Architecture. Here, Goff-man envisions a glittering mountaintop temple of renewal—part secular sanctuary, part fairy-tale retreat—interweaving themes of purification, ideology, and architectural transcendence.

Across all three works, Goffman explores the architecture of idealism and the systems, both visible and concealed, that uphold it. Her miniature, 3D-printed landscapes hold the viewer at a careful distance, both inviting and withholding. Utilizing historical pastiche and digital fabrication, Goffman collapses time and place, reassembling fractured narratives into richly detailed physical fictions. As she notes, “3D printing becomes a way of translating the unreal and fantastical into the physi-cal and material… The architecture of utopia almost always relies on the architecture of resource extraction.”