David Goldes: Electricities

Electricity in its myriad forms has intrigued people for centuries. In our modern era it powers nearly every machine and modern convenience that defines contemporary life. However, by hiding power lines underground or in the walls of our homes and through generations of miniaturization, our sense of what electricity is and how we have come to understand it is not widely considered. Electricities is comprised of photographs that depict constructions Goldes refers to as ‘performing still-lifes’ based on historical experiments into the nature of electricity. Electrical phenomena including electrostatics, high-voltage arcing, Faraday’s first transformer, water conductivity, electrified graphite drawings, and other inventions and experiments form the basis of these works. Elegant and playful, Goldes uses commonplace materials such as string, pins, wire, pencil lines and bright colored backgrounds in his ingenious investigations. The photographs reveal how electricity behaves; how it jumps gaps, repels, attracts, arcs, destroys, and often confounds our expectations. Uniting the strategies of art and science his visually rigorous images reveal a mechanistic understanding of electricity in dialogue with the viewer’s subjectivities that can expand, build upon and even contradict such explanations.