click for bio

The leather pieces of the Icarian series evoke images of friends, acquaintances and thousands of minimally-clad bodies struggling for one more rep, gathered around to giggle or gossip, gazing at their reflection in the mirror.

 

While some men watch their bodies develop to a level of physical perfection, others observe a subtle decline as they labor to minimize the effects of a quart of Ben and Jerry's, or gravity, or time. Still others while they rest between sets, witness the devastating impact of AIDS.

 

These skins have literally recorded it all, and they speak to us with quiet eloquence about beauty and vanity, exertion and exhaustion, vitality and mortality. It is through the gradual destruction of the skins that we eventually perceive our own image: our hopes and passions and follies. It is in their preservation under glass that we confront the amazing transformation that has taken place within them, and ourselves.

 

Such is the power of this work that the artist admits to being "haunted" by the forms they suggest. He has been inspired to interpret them in two new works, using two different materials. In "Suspended Figure," hand cut pieces of bronze mesh are individually suspended by steel wires from a plexiglass "halo." Like glowing flames or autumnleaves, each piece moves when the viewer's body stirs the air. "Ghost Torso" is made from chunk glass, detritus from a stained-glass factory. Cast-offs like the leather bench covers, the inherent beauty of the glass is revealed as the chunks hang in mid-air, translucent, sparkling and shimmering. It is almost as if Goldstein the alchemist has given form to the formless.

-BH-

 

For more on Daniel Goldstein's
Work, please see the
Essay by Robert Atkins