Synesthesia (from the Ancient Greek "together" and "sensation") is a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. Goldman creates an inter-sensual metamorphose from sound to visual, visualizing the sound through an object. Resonance and rhythm are being embodied in bare wood used to create patterns of mountains and sea landscape.
Synesthesia supported by START and Gordon Gallery is a continuing project to the one man show of Goldman L.A.N.D in Wilfrid Museum which presented an experiment in growing lands and mountains as existence alternatives. The nutrition the mountains were raised on was based on ocean's sound and musical compositions of dripping liquids. The current project is accompanied by the same colorfulness drawn from a world of laboratories, artificial seaweed growing and shades of depths. Alongside with new works is shown a fragment of the installation from the Wilfrid museum of silicon figurines swimming in turquoise liquid inside laboratory jars that reacts to sound with lighting using sound sensors.
The presented works offer varied attempts to visualize sound; from combined sensors that react to concrete sounds in the space to abstract impressions of certain music created in industrial wood pieces compositions.
The wood, readymade, carpentries' waste is used as a key material in the process. Plywood becomes the platform for drawings of audio-graphs, a graphic translation of sounds that seem like mountains made of height lines or ocean waves. Next to the drawings attached different wood pieces that its texture becomes geological layers in the lan
dscape picture. Between the different elements and between the painted ship's flagpoles or electric poles, there are strings attached, that actually wire all the objects to each other. Any other human presence is absent and the strings are remains of hopeless communication in a post-apocalyptic world. The feeling of un-functioning and blocked communication is created also when Goldman combines parts of sound technology like speakers that he disables and puts behind glass as if it was an archeological item, like in the work "No Sound No Memory" which becomes a testimony of sound that was silenced, of human presence that disappeared.
To the same post-apocalyptic reality belong the mountains that were raised in a laboratory as an existence alternative and it return and appear on wood platform painted in a removal technique, as a peeled negative from a layer of a bluish paint. In some of the works from the series of "Floating Mountains" there is still some of the scotch tape which marked the shape. Through time the tape will keep on peeling and the mountain image will keep on coming into being.
Goldman is using wood not only as a platform but also as an object and as a line. Wood pieces in different lengths set up in a rhythmic composition on the wall sketch an audio- graph based on a record of the waves' sound from the marina in Herzliya. The industrial wood- leftovers of dynamic human activity mark remains of sound that occurred. Out of the experiments in wood made sound graphs developed a language expressed in the works series- "Reorganizing the Methods of Our Thinking". The wood pieces are being released from the audio- graph and get organized freely in varied compositions that capture the impression of different musical formations. The names of the works in the series are taken from the name of the song or a line from it. The mystifying names make the viewer wonder about the formal and conceptual relationships between the work and the title. One work from this series is called “Arigato” as the name of the musical piece under its inspiration it was made and it is also a homage of Goldman to the Japanese artist Masaru Emoto, who passed away this October. Emoto was making experiments or ceremonies which were based on the belief that water molecules react to different emotional energies and to different kinds of music and its reaction is expressed in the shapes that the ice crystallizes.
Written by Efrat Gal