NEW YORK, NY.- Cristin Tierney Gallery is presenting Neil Goldberg: Vote in the Midterm Elections. This is Goldberg’s first solo show with the gallery, and includes video, photography, and performance. Vote in the Midterm Elections continues through Saturday, December 15th.
Goldberg’s exhibition title is a call to action and an acknowledgment of the horrific and surreal context in which this show opens. It is also reflective of the artist’s engaged approach to the place and time he inhabits. A longtime New Yorker, Goldberg frames and illuminates often overlooked moments of beauty, absurdity, and humanity within a constantly changing and at times chaotic urban setting. Each project mirrors our world back to us, asking us to look closer and attune ourselves to the act of attention itself. Goldberg's call to vote, pragmatic and inciting even couched within the good-humored fatalism of his work, is an extension of this methodology.
At center stage in Vote in the Midterm Elections is Goldberg’s ongoing project Inhibited Bites. Pulling back the veil on the artist’s creative process, Inhibited Bites showcases a collection of index cards, each bearing an aphorism or phrase in permanent marker and produced at an often-daily clip for about twenty years. A record of fleeting thought or concentrated realization, the cards reflect on themes thoroughly infused with Goldberg’s particular sense of unromantic pathos and humor: childhood and aging, art practice, urban life, friendship, sensory experience. The cards serve as a unifying thread for the collection of work on display, which spans a variety of media and several decades. As Goldberg notes, “Every piece of art in the show started as an index card.”
The personal biography referenced in Goldberg’s cards, in particular his relationship with his father, is a significant theme of Vote in the Midterm Elections. The index cards are housed in a spinning device that is part art vitrine, part magic trick. Shuffling the contents with each turn and randomizing the artist’s selections, it desanctifies the presentation of a project that had always been spontaneous. Its DIY, carnivalesque aesthetic alludes to the magic tricks and games he created with his father in his youth—a collaboration that was decisive in his becoming an artist. A video in the exhibition, A System for Writing Thank You Notes, features Goldberg’s father describing the method he devised for composing letters to all of the people who expressed their condolences upon his wife’s passing. The attention to language and the interest in social ritual and interpersonal connection bears a family resemblance to the logic behind Inhibited Bites.
On Fridays and Saturdays the artist will use his index cards as prompts for conversations with anyone who stops by, plus scheduled guest artists, writers, performers, activists, and community groups from across the city. Goldberg will skip two Saturday performances before the Midterm Election Day to knock on doors in a nearby swing district. If you are interested in helping the artist turn out the vote this fall by canvassing neighborhoods or helping with phone banking, data entry, or more, please contact us at info@cristintierney.com.
Neil Goldberg (b. Long Island, New York) makes visual art and performance work that focuses on embodiment, sensing, mortality, and the everyday. His work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, The Museum of the City of New York, The Kitchen, and elsewhere. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and teaches at the Yale School of Art. The New York Times described his work as “tender, moving and sad but also deeply funny," and Time Out New York declared that “Goldberg has produced some of the most quietly intense and affecting art of his generation.”
