David Goldes: Nothing on Faith
By George Slade
En route to a doctorate in physics, David Goldes realized that he wasn’t a scientist. Scientists reduce complexity, with a goal of distilling unified theory out of chaos and ambiguity. Science likes to name, while art likes open-endedness and is willing to accept multiple answers to questions about unquantifiable, elusive topics such as love and beauty. Goldes was drifting toward the ambiguous, away from the shores of surety.
So, after undergraduate study in biology and chemistry and with a Masters in molecular genetics from Harvard in hand, David Goldes the almost-Ph.D. changed course and became David Goldes the photographer. In 1977, six years after leaving Harvard, he received his M.F.A. from Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester (NY). And he’s been returning to science ever since.
One motivation has been the desire to see with his own eyes and record phenomena with the large-format camera as extension and confirmation of his witnessing vision. Goldes’ mantra, especially in times of absent weapons of mass destruction and all-too-present financial prestidigitation (Madoff, Petters, etal.), has been “nothing on faith, see for myself.” From his earliest constructions using cow hearts, to studio demonstrations of capillary action, vegetative electricity, wind currents, and fluid dynamics[i] to portraits of adolescents that reflect on the state of change, his work has embraced the nature of organic change and sought the truth of appearances (at least as far as it can be rendered in photography’s inherent fictions). The work present in this on-line portfolio draws attention to light, volume, velocity, and chemical reaction.
His space can resemble a laboratory, or a sculptor’s studio—a recent series has focused on shaped, silvery mesh. Wrapped around an object then removed, the mesh fashions a three-dimensional trace of an object’s physical limits, defining where its form meets the atmosphere with light as much as with material. The mesh forms—chairs, test tubes and microscopes, scalpels, fruit—strewn about Goldes’ studio, are 21st-century Claes Oldenberg soft sculptures, squishy but with a high tech edge of luminosity and transparency.
Typically, Goldes works on an intimate scale. Tabletop photography describes his practice, if only in measuring the spaces his subjects occupy. Belying the commercial implications of “tabletop,” Goldes’ photography is technically virtuosic; his prints are black-and-white marvels, still relying on and educing all the nuances of gelatin silver paper as the venue for his explanatory fictions. For his photographs, while trading on truths, are still propositions. As scientists know, any proved theory becomes the platform for further investigations. Goldes recent, ongoing project involves recreations of certain axiomatic diagrams from 18th century science manuals. For Goldes, embarking this summer on a sabbatical from his teaching at MCAD, these diagrams show attitudes toward truth and opinions about the possibilities, or limits, of representation. He’s hoping to look beyond the “gospel of perfection” that these images preach, and to validate the underlying science.
[i] Water Being Water is the name of his first monograph, published 2005 by Wright State University Art Galleries to accompany an exhibition titled Art/Science.
All images appear on the site courtesy of David Goldes.
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