This work produces a sense of longing for enchanted childhood moments, stunning miniature words, magical realms of glitter-covered party favors, color, kitsch, and visual excess.

The artist presents an eclectic collection of visual images reminiscent of nineteenth-century itinerant circuses, with their range of human types and deformations. To this end, she makes use of images form anatomy books, plastic necklaces from China, and a picture of an 18th-century cabinet of wonders. These elements all come together to form a colorful, bewitching, three-dimensional collage. This all-encompassing treasure trove appears to arrest time, working against the modern mechanisms of categorization, classification, and rational thinking.

Goldstein uses the camera to transport us on a journey composed of theatrical close-ups, imagined scenes that take place in an illogical and unfamiliar world, a collection of fragments that form an enigmatic flow of images. The room comes to life as the figures begin to move. The carousel turns, a tiger drums rhythmically to the beat of the music, eyes open and gaze ahead from within the wall. The camera’s lens hovers among the images as if in a dream whose logic is understood by the dreamer alone.

In the course of this performance, the artist films the figures on the table, infusing them with life. Projected onto a large screen, the miniature details are blown up before the viewer, enhancing the fantasy and enabling us to believe, if only momentarily, that magical worlds may indeed exist.

Less Reading...