ARTISTS
Mike Goldby: Promises
When I desire you a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me. So reasons the lover at the edge of eros. The presence of want awakens in him nostalgia for wholeness. His thoughts turn toward questions of personal identity: he must recover and incorporate what is gone if he is to be a complete person. 鈥揂nne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet
To be at the edge of eros, for Carson, is to be at the boundary of desire, the moment when a love ignites. Shifting focus from the pleasant aspects of new love, Carson calls attention elsewhere, to the painful reckoning the desirous individual undergoes as they are split into two: part former self and part a consuming want of another. But what is to be made of the other edge of eros, the boundary demarcated by the dissolution of a love or a desire? To me, it seems possible that this second edge is one of unification. That, through an estrangement, the individual reckons not with a splitting, but with a fusion as they fight to restore their own discrete wholeness.
In Promises, Mike Goldby negotiates this latter edge and the encounter of the self鈥攊n all its frustrations and glories鈥攊n the dissipating wake of eros. The images that comprise this exhibition were selected from Goldby鈥檚 personal archive and illustrate both literally and thematically the intimacies that are created through establishing distance. The images are quotidian鈥攁 lilac bush, a bathroom selfie, a drink鈥攂ut in practice they represent tentative discoveries, made through a perspective in flux. In A Lover鈥檚 Discourse, Barthes talks about how a telephone can 鈥淸resume] its trivial existence鈥� once you鈥檙e no longer waiting for your lover to call; but, by the same token, a lilac bush might adopt a sublimity as it transforms into a clarifying source of hope.
Ultimately, this body of work is a negotiation: a dialogue between a self and the ghost of the absent lover over where to draw the line鈥攐r the edge鈥攂etween them. It is host to confusions and clarities, concealments and disclosures; and it embodies the complicated truth that, try as we might, we can never restore a former wholeness, we can only ever shape a new one. Because, after a love, one鈥檚 wholeness can no longer exist, will not seal shut, without holding the traces left by the other.
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When I desire you a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me. So reasons the lover at the edge of eros. The presence of want awakens in him nostalgia for wholeness. His thoughts turn toward questions of personal identity: he must recover and incorporate what is gone if he is to be a complete person. 鈥揂nne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet
To be at the edge of eros, for Carson, is to be at the boundary of desire, the moment when a love ignites. Shifting focus from the pleasant aspects of new love, Carson calls attention elsewhere, to the painful reckoning the desirous individual undergoes as they are split into two: part former self and part a consuming want of another. But what is to be made of the other edge of eros, the boundary demarcated by the dissolution of a love or a desire? To me, it seems possible that this second edge is one of unification. That, through an estrangement, the individual reckons not with a splitting, but with a fusion as they fight to restore their own discrete wholeness.
In Promises, Mike Goldby negotiates this latter edge and the encounter of the self鈥攊n all its frustrations and glories鈥攊n the dissipating wake of eros. The images that comprise this exhibition were selected from Goldby鈥檚 personal archive and illustrate both literally and thematically the intimacies that are created through establishing distance. The images are quotidian鈥攁 lilac bush, a bathroom selfie, a drink鈥攂ut in practice they represent tentative discoveries, made through a perspective in flux. In A Lover鈥檚 Discourse, Barthes talks about how a telephone can 鈥淸resume] its trivial existence鈥� once you鈥檙e no longer waiting for your lover to call; but, by the same token, a lilac bush might adopt a sublimity as it transforms into a clarifying source of hope.
Ultimately, this body of work is a negotiation: a dialogue between a self and the ghost of the absent lover over where to draw the line鈥攐r the edge鈥攂etween them. It is host to confusions and clarities, concealments and disclosures; and it embodies the complicated truth that, try as we might, we can never restore a former wholeness, we can only ever shape a new one. Because, after a love, one鈥檚 wholeness can no longer exist, will not seal shut, without holding the traces left by the other.
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