Joan Goldin: Un Still Life

Opening Reception Saturday, September 18 4:30 - 7:30pm

Exhibition dates: September 18 - October 23, 2021 by appointment

Joan Goldin works primarily with photography and painting, in the space of their histories and disjunctions. She has produced multiple bodies of works that divulge creatures, forms, objects that are at once familiar and nameable, and then not so. Often these painterly dioramas are captured by a final photographic process where we are forever removed from any painterly immanence. These are nether worlds of restlessness—death, negation operate both figuratively and through our own fitful efforts, as we struggle to speak (inwardly or outwardly) of what we see. These forms and creatures have a spectral life - in their artistic captivity, they are intertwined with and anticipate our all-too-human desire to recognize, categorize, and separate from our human animal condition wherein our animality is the never-remembered-past.

Joan Goldin is a painter and photographer based in Chicago, IL. A medical artist, graduating from the University of Illinois, Medical School, Chicago. With a sharp eye and pencil, she translated complicated surgical procedures into clarifying images; those illustrations have been used in numerous medical publications, including the book “Atlas of Advanced Surgical Techniques”. With matching precision and persistence, Joan subsequently pursued other kinds of thinking and picture making with a BFA from the School of Art Institute at Chicago, IL, an MFA from Bard College, NY, along with a Phd ABD in Philosophy from European Graduate School, Switzerland. Joan’s work has been shown both here in Chicago - most recently at Slow, and in New York, most prominently at the Parish Art Museum, NY.