Goldfarb appropriates what typically passes for instantly familiar imagery — objects she photographs herself or sources from online photo archives — and subtly manipulates them, coaxing their appearance to near-flatness. She casts the entire composition in monochromatic tones that echo what one might consider the “essence” of the original object. Goldfarb distills these objects from their environments, highlighting their ubiquity and familiarity. Chess pieces, disposable silverware, and standard-issue barbeque grills suggest a contemporary landscape, perhaps one populated by disposables and plastics; weathered boots, sensuously worm boxing gloves, and a small casket all carry profound weight, suggesting forces exerted upon the body in myriad ways. If the former category hints at the ephemeral or whimsical, then the latter might link the process of recollection with a longer sense of history — a register of how one wears, carries, or is carried through time itself. Rebecca Goldfarb received her BA in Art and Environmental Studies from Pitzer College in 1996 and her MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004. Goldfarb’s work crosses a range of media that includes sculpture, drawing, installation and photo-based media to explore the sensual and conceptual experience of things. Goldfarb’s projects linger, in the artist’s own words, in the “infinite and in-between space where language, thought, memory, and sense interact as ways to investigate the act of thinking and seeing.”
