Rochelle Goldberg: Sun Moon Stars

The work of Vancouver-born, Berlin-based artist Rochelle Goldberg finds root in the unstable boundaries between seemingly fixed entities: animate and inanimate, self and other, renewal and decay. Her sculptures often merge ephemeral and enduring matter such as crude oil, bronze, glitter, steel, and seeds to enact installations that project forward and backward in time, combining art historical iconography with allusions to ongoing processes of transformation, contamination and growth. In Sun Moon Stars, Goldberg continues her engagement with Mary of Egypt, a fifth-century saint who has served as a recurring point of reference in her practice. Historically framed as a repentant sinner who turned away from the carnal and material to pursue a life of scarcity in the desert, the artist recasts Mary here in dialogue with the image of another highly determined figure — the 20th-century pinup model — tracing the anachronistic frameworks that tether these icons to both one another and the present moment. The images and forms that Goldberg marshals in this scene are at once fragmentary, suspended and unfixed, pointing us toward continuous cycles of making and unmaking — material, mythical and epistemological — and to the sedimentary structures that have long shaped Western constructions of body, self and environment. Sun Moon Stars (2023) was originally commissioned by Mercer Union, Toronto.