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Spotlight Reviews
MASSACHUSETTSKingston Gallery/Bostonwww.kingstongallery.com AUDREY GOLDSTEIN: MODUS MUTUS (SILENT SYSTEM) Modus Mutus, an evocative installation by sculptor Audrey Goldstein, undertakes a nuanced study of human vulnerability —body and soul—without bombast or sentimentality. Acupuncture Table and Cupping Chair, the installation’s two elements, look like closed mechanical-therapeutic systems attuned to human scale and form, but they are uninhabited, perhaps abandoned. Each represents a distinct approach to healing and hence a distinct form of dialogue between body and mind, suffering and hope. These systems have adherents today but are still essentially alien: Acupuncture (pins strategically placed to relieve pain) remains culturally and geographically distant; cupping (evacuated glass cups inverted on the skin to draw “excess” blood), although revived by New Age practitioners, has long been outside mainstream medicine, and its dark associations are akin to torture. The installations’ deliberately antiquated forms and raw finishes convey a desperate stretch beyond present definitions of scientific knowledge and imply the limitations and eventual erosion of its validity. In their vulnerability and silence, Goldstein’s installations seem to incorporate time’s gathering dust and inevitable decay, conveying an elegiac, forlorn sense of desperate efforts bravely but vainly undertaken. Mechanical functioning intimately conjoined with human functioning emerged in Goldstein’s earlier sculpture and installations. Her Circum (System) series—wall hangings composed of tubing, wires, and various fiber lengths and meshes— focused on the movement and meaning of breath as an avatar of being and consciousness. Goldstein’s bulbous, tangled forms, hidden spaces, and nonart materials recall Eva Hesse sculptures such as Metronomic Irregularity, but even more Louise Bourgeois’s Cells. The transmittal of information from body to therapist in the Acupuncture Table or, especially, from body to machine in the Cupping Chair, with its more bizarre (and discredited) concept and more constraining, uncomfortable apparatus, exists only theoretically. The intricate, delicately rendered diagrams beside the re-created cupping chair emphasize this. Systems for perceiving and
Goldstein has built a complex equivalent of the sorrow of this frailty, but she does not abandon the dialogue. Light as well as time participate here. Scrims shelter the structures and their hypothetical occupants, filtering and diffusing natural light into a hazy aura quite unlike clinical lighting. Thus binding her physical elements, Goldstein resuscitates hope by renewing the vital connection to the present, to this time of day, this accident of weather, of being. The artist has described her work as “a response to the shifting nature of the physical, emotional, and psychological conditions which shape our beliefs.” Continuous with her earlier examinations of self, consciousness, art, and experience, Modus Mutus engages a sphere conjoining the intimate and the clinical. The body, both inviolable self and transient receptacle, becomes, even when absent, the locus of perception and the yearning for wholeness and union. Susan Boulanger Also reviewed in this issue: New England/New Talent: 7th Biennial Exhibition at the Fitchburg Art MuseumFinned & Feathered at the Essex Art Center Steve McQueen at the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College Wendy Edwards: The Skin Between at the Beard Gallery at Wheaton College Tetsuya Noda: Diary Souvenirs at the Wenniger Gallery Collected Evidence: Regeneration and Containment at the New Art Center in Newton Ruth Mordecai: A Sculptor's Paintings & Works on Paper at the Nesto Gallery at Milton Acedemy Matta: Making the Invisible Visible at the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College Kiki Smith at Barbara Krakow Gallery |
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