https://kboo.fm/media/62269-joseph-gallivan-interviews-ellen-goldschmidt-about-her-show-hot-lava-family-pictures
Please scroll to bottom of page and click on play button to hear my interview with Art Focus' Joseph Gallivant. We discuss my December 2017 show at Blackfish Gallery in Portland:
Hot Lava: Family Pictures
Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner (Me)
Updated May 13 at 4:23 PM
Published May 11 at 7:00 AM
Upon seeing artist Ellen Goldschmidt's series of graphite portraits on paper, Surrounded by Feeling, my First Thursday companion, a writer, whispered, "They're like haiku." I let out the groan of appreciation you make when someone puts words to a thought you didn't know you had. That was it: Goldschmidt captures moments like a poet—simply, but always alluding to something greater and further beyond.
In Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner (Me), a finely rendered figure of a small girl is cropped almost entirely out of the composition, except for in the bottom right corner. She extends her chubby arm diagonally across the paper into a vast plain of negative space, the expression on her face also reaching for something.
The same subject appears in Tweak, similarly cropped, but she is slightly older and more roughly drawn. Her arm is pulled back, like the string of a bow, in a mischievous gesture that suggests she is about to flick someone in the face. In another portrait, the little girl sits alone in the middle of the composition trying to buckle her shoe, its mate nowhere in sight.
Goldschmidt conveys so much to the viewer—isolation, longing, otherness, playful antagonism—not by what she includes in her drawings, but by what she leaves out. It is the elliptical nature of her work that makes it so powerful because the viewer is left to fill in everything we can't see.
Much of the series revolves around Goldschmidt's relationship with her older sister. The artist chose to de-emphasize the technical aspects of portraiture, allowing her hand to be guided by something less cerebral. "Feeling is too often subordinated in life and in art," she says. "I'm interested in reasserting balance by privileging emotion in my work."
One particularly affecting piece, Bad Seed, is a frenetic sketch in which an older sister in the foreground looks directly at the viewer, without expression, while a younger sister gazes up adoringly at her elder. In the background, the outline of a third, enormous face looms, the way it feels as a kid to have a parent constantly looking over your shoulder.
Goldschmidt says that the portraits "are created by inhabiting, rather than depicting, emotion," and as such, the process of making them was sometimes fraught, thinking back on old hurts and traumas. But in doing so, Goldschmidt gives us a visceral window into the pains and rivalries of siblinghood.
SEE IT: Ellen Goldschmidt's Surrounded by Feeling is at Blackfish Gallery, 420 NW 9th Ave., 503-224-2634. Through May 28.
Willamette Week, 5/11/16, Vol 42/28
February 4- 27, Kathrin Cawein Gallery, Pacific University, 2043 College Way, Forest Grove, OR,
Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 1-5 pm
Two new drawings and a dramatic installation of the 12'x12' male figure Interloper in the Pacific University library atrium are highlights of Goldschmidt's show at the Forest Grove, OR, campus. The new pieces, the latest in the artist's series of jumbo improvisational drawings, feature portraits of single figures, five times life size, that spring from her imagination. Goldschmidt uses no models or photographic references to create her psychologically acute narratives. The show features eight large-scale, unframed works in graphite, charcoal and ink on paper.
Images, clockwise from left: Post Presidency, 2015, charcoal and graphite on paper, 98"x71"; Fidelity, 2015, charcoal, ink, collage on paper, 104"x106"; Interloper, 2014, charcoal, ink, collage on paper, 144"x144"; Boardroom, 2013, graphite, charcoal, ink, pastel, collage on paper, 87"x141"; Humpty Dumpty, 2014, charcoal, ink, collage on paper, 86" x 79"; poster featuring detail of Interloper.
PLEASE JOIN ME….
August 5-30, 2014, First Thursday Opening, August 7, 6-9 pm, Blackfish Gallery 420 NW 9th, Portland, OR
The juror was Jenene Nagy, artist, independent curator, Artistic Director of Painting and Printmaking and Chair of the Artist-In-Residence program Anderson Ranch Arts Center. From 2011-12 Nagy was the Curator-in-Residence for Disjecta Contemporary Art Center in Portland.
Goldschmidt was one of 17 artists selected. Two of her works will be on view. July 3-30, 2014, The Hoffman Gallery, OCAC campus, 8245 SW Barnes Rd., Portland. Opening Reception: Thursday, Jul 3, 4-6 pm
Sunday, August 17, 2014, 5-7 pm
Light refreshments. Free and open to the public.
Join a discussion of narrative—visual vs written and enjoy open mike readings of stories and poems inspired by the large-scale drawings in Ellen Goldschmidt’s August, 2014 Blackfish exhibition, Interlopers: Unintended Narratives.
The goal of this interactive, interdisciplinary evening is to deepen understanding of the narrative impulse and the differing creative processes that beget visual and literary narratives.
The evening opens with a conversation between Goldschmidt and Blackfish member Merridawn Duckler, a writer, writing teacher and visual artist, about the exhibition, the human impulse to form narratives and the tradition of collaboration between visual artists and writers. Next, writers—professional and amateur—who have visited the show in advance of the event, will read their narratives, inspired by, or riffing on the drawings on view.
For information on how to participate: blackfish.com/news/narrative-impulse
