16 February 2017, 6-8pm
Feb 15-25
Chapman & Bailey
350 Johnston St,
Abbotsford
Introduction -
Hannah Goldstein - Die Gespensterstunde
16 February 2017, 6-8pm (Feb 15-25)
Chapman & Bailey 350 Johnston St Abbotsford
Chapman & Bailey 350 Johnston St Abbotsford
The collaged works in hannah goldstein’s new exhibition Die Gespensterstunde (The Ghost Hour) is a follow up and departure from her last solo exhibition held at Jacob Hoerner Galleries in 2015. In this new series goldstein presses her main medium – photography – a step further and abandons it in part through the removal or reduction of major parts of the images she chooses to present in her work. At the same time goldstein continues to be drawn to the faceless characters that inhabit her art world and the exploration of how we can make a portrait of a person without showing the subject’s face.
“If we strip an image, a portrait to the bare minimum, what do we have left, is there a story still there to tell?”
As a teacher of photography the statement above is something that goldstein’s tries to communicate with her students. To question the power of the image has always been a great interest of goldstein and this line of questioning and interest formed the premise for her earlier 2015 body of work It’s too dark to see your face. In goldstein’s collages she strips the protagonist figure of their surroundings and much of the essentials of the image, leaving the viewer to have to fill in the gaps.
The faceless characters float over the paper almost like ghosts. In shapes and forms that may not make sense, body parts cut off in odd angels. It is as if she has tried to create an outer body expectance for the faceless characters, that same feeling that you may have in a dream. In the smaller works large objects interfere in the landscape and floating bodies head for possible death. The scenes have a dreamlike state that takes place in the Gespensterstunde. They mirror some of goldstein’s own fears of flying and water, and also reflect some of her odd moments that she experience during the Gespensterstunde.
