Joan Goldin’s work is continually re-seeing, revising, with many a take on any given view, and her art comes alive in the capacities of various media: photography, oil, charcoal, graphite.
All this, whether magnifying the minuscule, elevating the mundane (and making even death life-affirming), or recording, with a superb feeling for fear, the dissection of a melon, a goat, and again and again a hare.
Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot read
The hunter’s waking thoughts.
W.H. Auden, 1935, in (of all the imagined imaginative places) The Dog Beneath the Skin.
Joan Goldin, too, has the powers of an artist-huntress who, reaching to what is beneath the skin, never loses touch with — or sight of — the very skin itself.
