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MEMORIES OF PLACES I HAVE NEVER BEEN

In "Memories of Places I Have Never Been," Jill Goldman attempts to tell the story of her father, to construct a coherent narrative of his life and his death. This much is certain: In 1971, when she was nine years old, Goldman found her father dead in his bed. It was August 23, his mother’s birthday. He had apparently shot himself in the head. An ambulance came and took him away. That night for dinner, she ate a baked potato and peas.

 For almost five decades, Goldman lived with this barest of outlines. Shortly after we met as students in Paris in the early 80s, she told me about her father’s suicide in a remarkably blasé tone. Jill was a brilliant, curious and intense student who could expound on everything from Madonna to Julia Kristeva in passionate and hyper-animated discourses and “blasé” was not an adjective typically used to describe her. Yet, she spoke of this…

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 INVESTIGATION

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In the winter of 2019, I was the artist in residence at Arcane Space.  I was already deeply involved in the investigation of the life and death of my father, who died by suicide in 1971 when I was 9 years old. Determined to unravel the mystery of his death, I interviewed people who knew him, looked at old photographs and sorted through boxes of memorabilia my mother and sister had saved. The gallery became my own creative crime lab. I covered its walls with the evidence I collected, constructing an enormous crime board that connected people and events. I later found out that this process is called “link analysis” which, significantly for this moment, is also used by the CDC to track epidemics. In the end, however, my attempts to track my father’s story were futile and his death remains shrouded in mystery.

-Jill Goldman

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“Unlike the Nordic noir television shows that the artist likes to watch, with their reassuring narratives that establish law and order in a chaotic world, Goldman’s board does not solve the crime. Newspaper clippings, congressional reports, photographs of showgirls and mobsters are crisscrossed with insistent red lines, each convoluted network manically mapping out potential storylines that only trouble the truth by leading in too many directions.”

 
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 ARTIFACTS

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“Objects that belonged to the dead tell stories and can function as talismans for the living. They have almost magical powers to resurrect a presence from the overwhelming absence. Even the most mundane belongings can transform into religious relics, capable of miraculously healing our wounds. Yet, the artifacts represented here remain oddly insentient, immune to enchantment.

 
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MEMORIES OF PLACES I HAVE NEVER BEEN

“In what the artist aptly calls a ‘reverse Proustian exercise,’ she tried to create memories she never had by visiting places she had never been. These mournful and arresting photographs of empty lots and swimming pools, of houses now occupied by invisible strangers belie their purported function as illustrations of a life. Instead of prompting a story à la Proust’s Madeleine, one that would create connection to her father, these images are defiantly devoid of any paternal trace, remarkable for their beautiful and eerie emptiness.”

 
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“These moving images of Goldman walking alone, of long stretches of flat highways and fields, of nondescript architecture, of the artist laying flowers on her dead father’s dead mother’s grave reveal everything about the futility of her quest, and nothing about the father she’s searching for.”

 

 
 
 

“’The Letter,’ in which Goldman reads her father’s suicide note for the first time, is the most poignant, elegiac, and emotionally fraught piece in the show. It includes recently found footage of the nine-year-old Jill directing herself in a movie, filmed in her psychoanalyst’s office, a film that is a deeply unnerving drama of identity and loss.”

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“In ‘Black, Red, White,’ the adult Jill Goldman directs herself in another film. This time it’s a video that symbolically acknowledges her failure to give her father’s death a coherent narrative, but also depicts her triumph over this loss in a resurrection, not of her father, but of herself.”

 

We all want a story. Especially one with a happy ending.

-Jill Goldman

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TO BUY

The following photos are available for purchase.

ARCANE Space will donate 100% of all proceeds to One Voice a non profit organization that provides relief and services to low income families in the Los Angeles area that are much in need, even more so now during this unprecedented time.

Individual unframed photographs can be purchased for $150 a will go directly to the One Voice Family Assistance/Emergency Relief Program which provides immediate intervention, food, clothing, furniture, schooling to families in critical need.