Tales of Metamorphosis: Rebekah Goldstein, James Perkins, and Amy Nathan

Online Exhibition with 8-Bridges
June 3 - 30, 2021

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” – Joan Didion

CULT Aimee Friberg Exhibitions is pleased to share works by Rebekah Goldstein, James Perkins and Amy Nathan for the June edition of 4x8-Bridges. 8-Bridges is a Bay Area gallery coalition showcasing 8 works by 8 galleries each month, with support to a local non-profit arts institution each edition. This month we are proud to support California College of the Arts.

At the intersection of Goldstein, Perkins and Nathan’s works is a desire to share stories about change. Each artist utilizes formal investigations as a way to share a narrative endowed from personal experience with a focus on transformation. Goldstein alludes to movements, memories and changes that took place in her body during pregnancy through the contours of her canvas, which escape the rectangular. While her paintings still retain a certain flatness, the unconventional shapes relate to the metaphorical journey of human-life, which is far from uniform.

Perspective and composition guide the narrative in Amy Nathan’s artworks, which reinterpret historical documents of ancient Greek and Roman mythologies to re-examine mythology from a feminist perspective. In these three drawings of photographs of ancient sculptures, Nathan considers how we acquire knowledge—the many filters, perspectives, and informed guesses that are part of any object’s narrative arc through time. By cropping source images to focus on certain details of warriors and goddesses, Nathan highlights the delicate moments, and the tools women use (literally and metaphorically) to hold themselves together. In the drawing, Athena wears Medusa, the goddess is portrayed wearing on her armor a brooch of Medusa. Medusa—whose head was used as a weapon in her own mythology— becomes a mediating talisman itself, an interface of public and private.

James Perkins creates paintings through performative installations that employ the elements and forces of nature to mark time on stretched silks and linens. Made on the beach in Fire Island, New York, Perkins’ work explores the beauty and experience of weathering the vicissitudes of life. The “post-totem structures” start outdoors in the language of sculpture and culminate as “nonsite” wall reliefs with marks made in collaboration with nature. He believes that we all navigate totems and their historical and contemporary values to paint an identity either closer to or further away from his idea of a neutral existence.