Exhibition: Psychometry
Reception: Sept. 26, 6-9 pm
Dates: Sept. 26 - Nov. 22, 2008

About the artist:

Carol Golemboski received an MFA in Photography from Virginia Commonwealth University and an MA in Art from The University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her recent series of black and white photographs, entitled Psychometry, addresses psychological issues concerning anxiety, loss and existential doubt. By combining photography with drawing, scratching the negative, and incorporating text and photograms, she infuses her images with tension and mystery.

Golemboski has been the recipient of numerous grants including individual artist fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and Light Work. Images from her Psychometry series have been published in notable photographic journals and magazines such as LensWork, Contact Sheet, and AfterImage. She is represented by several galleries nationwide including the Sandy Carson Gallery in Denver, the George Billis Gallery in Los Angeles, the Robert Klein Gallery in Boston, and Addison Arts in Santa Fe.

Artist Statement:

Psychometry is a series of black and white photographs exploring issues relating to anxiety, loss, and existential doubt. The term refers to the pseudo-science of "object reading," the purported psychic ability to divine the history of objects through physical contact. Like amateur psychometrists, viewers are invited to interpret arrangements of tarnished and weathered objects, relying on the talismanic powers inherent in the vestiges of human presence. These images suggest a world in which ordinary belongings transcend their material nature to evoke the elusive presence of the past.

Through an examination of fortune-telling and clairvoyance, many of the images confront the desperate human desire to know the unknowable, historically referencing the Victorian interest in spiritualism as well as the look of the nineteenth century photographic image. Illegible text and arcane symbols in pictures with themes like palm reading, tea leaf reading, and numerology force the viewer to consider man's insatiable need to anticipate his own fate.

The concept behind each picture dictates its darkroom manipulation, sometimes requiring research and revisions that last weeks or months. Combining photography with drawing, seamlessly incorporating photograms, integrating appropriated text, and scratching the emulsion of the negative create images where horror, history, and psychology occupy the same imaginative locale.

Pervading the work is a sense of melancholy for the past, and a mounting dread that comes with the realization that our own stories will suffer the same fate. These images are designed to create a tension between beauty and decay that expresses anxiety over the passage of time, the inevitability of death, and a fascination with the unknown.

- Carol Golemboski