ROCHELLE GOLDBERG - Psychomachia

About

My thoughts remain with Mary, beaming, alone in the desert. 

Is it the symbiotic relationship of the symbol to its witness that enables it to live forever? Where the Witness experiences the symbol as concrete, grounding the symbol’s existence, and conducting its scatter? If scatter poses an obliterating threat to the symbol through its witness, the perceived threat is merely a collapse of understanding, considering they need each other to keep breathing.

Can we then favor a state in which symbols operate allegorically, as interplay? Or mutation? Where obliteration can be seen as pulsing a re-distribution, as divulging streams of associations, so that allegorical insistence develops through the accumulation of objects with purposeful referents. This repetition is a resurrection, wherein the miracle of it all ordains a Witness. There is a Witness to these ‘attractions’ of communication forming between legible juxtapositions, carried by their histories and possibility. (There is a logic of desire motivating these associations, available to any witness.) And what if the Witness is the event itself – her corpse in this desert?

In the desert she digs up roots 

silty soil, low drainage, roots emerge shallow 

did she survive on love alone?

At least we know she died, in the desert, so that the Intralocutor might host a renewed understanding of an attractive experience – to go to the desert, to find love while living the mutation of bodily and material excess, through its inverse, scarcity. Scarcity becomes the excess, replaces it, so that self-annihilation is an infinite dissolve – through regenerative dying the symbol is liberated from its liturgical source, which is not any reality that may have taken place. Beyond the entropic, is the immense loss, overturned by the immense miracle, where a corpse dies, in order to live, to levitate, to host, to suspend. The body that survives on love alone in the desert is still beaming.

The symbol symbols even if it’s free

The perversity of this love, is that it is attributed to a self-rejection, a starvation as revelation, in a way that our extraction culture has forgotten the ability to consider an extended self, the self that spills with love across a landscape.

While surviving on love alone in the desert:

She is developing life goals and she resents a tiny universe 

she needed a new experience, a softer fatality

since she was dead, and she did remember.

⦁

I am happy for her, that she made friends in the desert.

Born in Vancouver, Canada, Rochelle Goldberg earned her MFA from Bard College, and currently lives and works in New York and Berlin. Last spring, Waves and Waves, a two-person exhibition with Rebecca Brewer opened at Oakville Galleries in Ontario, followed by a solo exhibition, gatekeepers, at Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver. Among other group shows in 2019, her work was selected for the first Frieze Sculpture at Rockefeller Center, curated by Brett Littman. In 2018, she was the winner of the Battaglia Foundry Sculpture Prize #03 and Artist-in-Residence at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa. Further, Goldberg was the Artist-in-Residence at the Atelier Calder in the spring of 2017, and the recipient of the 2015 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award. Institutional solo exhibitions include The Plastic Thirsty at SculptureCenter, New York (2016), No Where, Now Here at GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy (2017), born in a beam of light at The Power Station, Dallas (2018) and Casa del sol at Casa Masaccio, San Giovanni Valderno, Italy (2018). In 2018, she also mounted Pétroleuse with curator Milan Ther at Éclair, Berlin. In 2016, Goldberg contributed a large-scale installation work to Mirror Cells, curated by Christopher Lew and Jane Panetta at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and participated in the Okayama Art Summit, a biennial exhibition organized by Liam Gillick across multiple venues in Okayama, Japan. Intralocutors, her first solo exhibition at Miguel Abreu Gallery, was on view in the spring of 2017. Cannibal Actif, her first monograph designed with Geoff Kaplan, was co-published by Totem and Sequence Press. Her second monograph, born in a beam of light, will be published by The Power Station in Spring 2020.