Electricity is the energy that runs nearly everything. We are dependent on it for light, heat, and communications as well as powering the innumerable devices and machines that shape and support our lives. To investigate and build on our historical understanding into the nature of electricity, David Goldes constructs and photographs what he calls, “performing still lifes.” Electrical phenomena including electrostatics, high-voltage arcing, Faraday’s first transformer, water conductivity, electrified graphite drawings, and other inventions and experiments form the basis of the photographs in 'Electricities'.
Elegant and playful, Goldes uses commonplace materials such as string, pins, wire, pencil lines, and brightly colored backgrounds in his ingenious investigations while also being sensitive to the visual transformations introduced by the photographic act itself. The images reveal how electricity behaves; how it jumps gaps, repels, attracts, arcs, destroys, and often confounds our expectations. Uniting the strategies of art and science, his visually rigorous images reveal a mechanistic understanding of electricity in dialogue with the viewer’s subjectivities that can expand, build upon, and seemingly contradict such explanations.
Texts include a conversation with noted writer, curator and artist David Campany, and a commentary by Kay Ryan, former U.S. Poet Laureate.
