Contemporary Jewish Museum ~ Dina Goldstein

                             

The Bride of Demons 

photo by Dina Goldstein

Jewish Folktales Retold: Artist as Maggid

Sep 28, 2017–Jan 28, 2018

This exhibition presents newly commissioned works by sixteen contemporary artists in response to a selection of tales from Jewish folklore. Acting as modern maggids—storytellers, transmitters of knowledge, secrets revealers—they explore the many facets of these stories’ characters, themes, and metaphors. Artists include: Michael Arcega, Julia Goodman, Dina Goldstein, Andy Diaz Hope and Laurel Roth Hope, Vera Iliatova, David Kasprzak, Mads Lynnerup, Elisabeth Higgins O’Connor, Mike Rothfeld, Tracey Snelling, Chris Sollars, M. Louise Stanley, Inez Storer, and Young Suh and Katie Peterson.

The photography of Dina Goldstein is luxurious, deeply textured, elaborately staged and subtly disquieting You have to look carefully to see the strange things going on in them; ancient themes with modern references. She creates large-scale photographic series in which she uses narratives and iconographies from popular culture, folklore, and religion, to expose the challenges our contemporary society faces.     

For Jewish Folktales Retold, photographer Goldstein interprets several known and lesser-known tales, including The Hair in the Milk, The Queen of Sheba, The Soul of the Ari, An Apple from the Tree of Life, The Dybbuk in the Well, The Golem, and more. Restaging the tales with modern props and settings, Goldstein confronts fascinating material: for example, in The Hair in the Milk, where Lilith comes to take afterbirth and kill the mother (she is only able to get into the house because of a faulty mezuzah). In The Queen of Sheba, a married man is seduced by Sheba through being showered with riches. But when his wife finds out, he loses everything.       

Goldstein is a photographer and Pop Surrealist with a background in editorial and documentary photography. For Goldstein, photography is intended not to produce an aesthetic that echoes current beauty standards, but to evoke and wrest feelings of shame, anger, shock and empathy from the observer, as to inspire insight into the human condition. Goldstein independently produces large-scale tableaux photographic series that are philosophical, satirical, technical and visually stunning.  

Image Credit Dina Goldstein, Ashmodai—The Bride of Demons, from the series Snapshots from the Garden of Eden, 2017. Ink on paper, 40 x 53 in. Courtesy of the artist.     

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Styrous® ~ Thursday, September 28, 2017         

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