Artist: Rochelle Goldberg
Exhibition title: Casa del Sol
Curated by: Rita Selvaggio
Venue: Casa Masaccio, San Giovanni Valdarno, Italy
Date: September 29 – November 4, 2018
Photography: OKNOstudio / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Casa Masaccio
Museo Casa Masaccio Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea is delighted to present Casa del Sol, a solo exhibition by Rochelle Goldberg (1984, Vancouver, CA). The show reorganizes the rooms of this old house with works and installations that break down customary models of value into glittering dust. Continuing with her inquiry into and continual probing of her artistic practice, Goldberg uses the allegorical digestion of gold to triangulate personal history and collective memory with the sculptural objects that throng this architectural arena – a place that for centuries we have continued to call home. What we see is an externalized internalization, as domestic forms and aquatic remains are left, unexpectedly, to rot under the sun. This metabolic putrefaction is not an involution. Rather it signals the reanimated return of what had once been laid bare. While respecting its ancient layers of history, Goldberg frees the Casa Masaccio from an imposed blindness, giving it back its own light so that formerly amnesiac eyes can stare into both the most distant future and the remotest past. A spectral sun, the origin and anchor of our life, breaks in. Its rays trail from one room to the next, together with the echo of endless voices, letting us catch just a glimpse, although without the slightest certainty and perhaps in a place where nothing will be found. The exhibition ventures into the errancy of time and the depths of inhabited space.
“I am born in a beam of light, I move continuously yet I’m still. I’m larger than life and yet do not breathe. Only in darkness am I visible. You can see me but never touch me. I can speak to you but never hear you. You know me intimately but I know you not at all. We are strangers and yet you take me inside you. what am I?”
Casa Del Sol
“And all the things she thought her house should have.”
“The title for this exhibition is in reference to the house where I was born.”
“Since we are re-arranging the former house of Masaccio for our own ends, I am renaming the site in order to make space for our own unfolding of Casa Del Sol.”
“The beam of light hits the wall as a memory.”
“But would she remember what had been there before?”
“White stucco turned pink still holds the cold temperature.”
“The flowers vomit all over the walls.”
“They know that dark histories cannot be held as private secrets.”
“I have an image in mind of the sun seen from great depths below the ocean, as if any one of the sculptures could have been exhumed from such a location…As if lost and submerged is the only true vantage from which to experience this. It’s both aspirational and necessary to attempt to reach a surface in order to breath…even if your tissue is inert such as that of a sculpture.”
“Nothing here has drowned or is drowning.”
“It’s crucial to me that we remain aspirational. Not in price point, because content is always free.”
“As we have learned from our shared interest in the temporal passage of gold, value itself is an animating force. When a value system changes, life is both resurrected and newly emergent.”
“What’s the unit of exchange in this different world of yours?”
“Even she, at length, was forced to acknowledge that times were changed.”
“Clearly I am still struck by the archeologists answer to the question “how do we know one era’s material culture (expressed in metal) was liquefied by the next,” the response as I mentioned, “because we continue to discover unique specimens submerged under both terrestrial and oceanic wreckage.”
“At the moment I feel that the sculptures I am working on are stranded in my life as I have come to know it right now.”
“Was she living her best life?” “She is living her best life.”
(and later she tried)
“Because the failure of her organ, even if an inherited condition, meant the whole system has to work harder, to pump it out of collapse.”
“and what about the stuff in the ground?“
“like the subject it must be brought up.”
Project being staged as part of Toscanaincontemporanea2018
Casa Del Sol has been made possible by the support of Miguel Abreu Gallery (New York), Galleria Federico Vavassori (Milan).
Thank you to: Atelier Calder, Saché (F); Michele Recanatini, Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Firenze
Rochelle Goldberg (1984, Vancouver, CA) earned her MFA from Bard College (NY), and currently lives and works in Berlin. She was the recipient of the 2015 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award; Artist-in-Residence at the Atelier Calder in the Spring of 2017, and she is the winner of the Third Edition (2018) of the Battaglia Foundry Sculpture Prize.
Recent solo exhibitions include The Plastic Thirsty, SculptureCenter, New York; A Worm Filled Body, Parisian Laundry, Montreal; No Where, Now Here, GAMeC, Bergamo; Intralocutors, Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York; Pétroleuse, Éclair, Berlin;1000 “emotions”, Federico Vavassori, Milan. Selected group exhibitions: Artists Institute, NY; Manoir de la Ville de Martigny; Kunstverein Dortmund; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Okayama Art Summit, Okayama; Front Desk Apparatus, New York; What Pipeline, Detroit; Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, Paris; Atelier Calder, Saché; WeissFalk, Basel; Oracle, Berlin; Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver. Forthcoming projects will include a residency at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas (2018) and solo exhibitions at The Power Station, Dallas (2019) and at Oakville Galleries, Oakville (2019).
