Two artists inspired by family trace how time shifts and transmutes all we hold dear, at Gallery Kayafas.
Audrey Goldstein recently helped her mother downsize. Her sculptural installation, “Shadowtime,” springs from the stuff left behind. The installation revolves around a sculpture made up of such stuff — pots and pans, a table leg. Goldstein wraps and binds it all up into bulbous forms gathering around patched-together sticks. Layers of translucent black silk lie in a puddle at its foot — a shadow that reflects the sculpture, but also the owner, or owners, of all that forms the sculpture.
We imbue personal objects with meaning; they reflect us, they become part of us. We leave them, and our shadow in some way remains. To make the rest of this installation, Goldstein suspended this sculpture over her worktable at different hours of the day and painted in the shadow it cast. The 24 door-size, translucent paintings make up the walls of a house, hanging between 2-inch-by-4-inch building studs framing the installation. The artist calls it “the house made of time.”
The sculpture looks rather like a hobo’s bundle on a stick. The ethereal paintings are more like a Genie emerging from a lamp, mutable and freighted. Within them, outlines of spoons or rolls of tape — more stuff from the old house — suggest ghosts of the discarded. “Shadowtime” conjures a place and its inhabitants. The objects are gone, but their meaning remains, intangible, whispering, glinting through light. It’s haunted, just as every house is.
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Robert Knight has been photographing his daughter, Eden, since she was born in 2006. In the 32 images in his show “Thirteen Ways,” we see childhood’s intimate trajectory — from the frank, open youngster in “Bruised Chin,” to the irritated adolescent in “Nutcracker” and the graceful young woman in “Magnolia.”
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Eden’s relationship with her father is implicit in the photographs as she grows not only up, but away. Someday, she will move, leaving behind a humming, hovering warmth like that in Goldstein’s installation. In the end, these shows are not merely about time. They’re about love.
AUDREY GOLDSTEIN: SHADOWTIME
ROBERT KNIGHT: THIRTEEN WAYS
At Gallery Kayafas, 450 Harrison Ave., through March 6. 617-482-0411, www.gallerykayafas.com
Cate McQuaid can be reached at catemcquaid@gmail.com.