Nan Goldin’s Sirens
The Photographer At London's Marian Goodman Gallery
Never failing to intoxicate the viewer with haunting and rousing images, Nan Goldin has used her photographic prowess to impart reflections which are dually dreamlike and startlingly true to life. Sirens, Goldin’s most recent solo exhibition, keeps in stride with the epic projects of the artist’s past. The exhibition, which is being housed at the Marian Goodman Gallery in London, will feature a conglomerate of four various thought processes and projects, converging together into one enticing collection.
Always and forevermore a fierce advocate of the LGBT movement, Goldin’s work all too often weaves back to the struggles of those in the process of transition; the backlash from the wider society always close behind. Goldin unabashedly uses flash photography coupled with raw intimacy to capture the individuals she has befriended within the discarded community. The transgender subjects in Goldin’s images are pictured vulnerable, candid, and stunningly genuine. As humans living their truths, their realness has a disarming effect.
As an individual who has found herself at the bottom of empty pill bottles and riddled in addiction, Goldin works now to illustrate what such suffering can amount to. In a body of work titled Memory Lost, the hollow world of drug addiction is expounded upon. Goldin collaborates with composer and instrumentalist Mica Levi as the sounds of the English musician’s work reverberates within the exhibition. The luring music itself lends an idea to what a trip through addiction itself might resemble.
Themes which have been less common in the horizon of Goldin’s portfolio make themselves seen throughout Sirens. A video which represents the Biblical times when King Herod ruled above many, including his stepdaughter, Salome, explores the cravings humans feel for lust, both in body and blood.
Perhaps one of the more unlikely elements of the exhibition is Goldin’s study on landscapes. Cloud-induced skies and fuzzy horizons are pictured in various hues of blues, purples, and oranges. Mostly soft, hazy, and unfocused, the images give light to another side of Goldin and releases a facet of the natural world. Taken in countries such as Italy, Brazil, France, and Ireland, the large-scale photographs are grounding amidst such human-centered work throughout the rest of the exhibition. Like a breath of cold sea air, the viewer is left tantalized, rejuvenated, and perhaps slightly intoxicated.
