In the work of Rochelle Goldberg, we are encouraged to question the supposed borders between living things and objects through the logic of \u201cintraction,\u201d her own term for destabilizing the complex sets of relations among entities. For Sun Moon Stars<\/em>, her recent solo exhibition at Mercer Union, Goldberg initiated a renewed reading of the myth of Mary of Egypt (known as the Desert Mother in Eastern Orthodox religions). Cast in bronze from the head of a Marilyn Monroe pin-up doll and her own pregnant body, Goldberg\u2019s Mary of Egypt is an emblem of how to reconfigure agency and to reconsider value as it relates to life and materials of monumentality. Making use of the distinct but elusive figure of the desert, she situates this exploration within a space of chance and opportunity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mary of Egypt is, in Goldberg\u2019s words, \u201cthe final appendage of the composite Mary,\u201d a trope originated by Pope Gregory I in 600 CE, as \u201cthere was not enough space for multiple Marys.\u201d1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - Mercer Union, \u201cVideo Walkthrough | Rochelle Goldberg: Sun Moon Stars,\u201d YouTube video, 5:24, 1 Nov. 2023, accessible online<\/span> As such, all biblical Marys (aside from the Virgin) were converged under the name and narrative of Mary Magdalene, thus originating the infamous virgin\/\u200a whore dichotomy. As the story goes, she was a prostitute in Alexandria who retired to the desert to repent as an ascetic hermit, bringing with her three loaves of bread and otherwise surviving on what she found. Meeting Zosimas of Palestine by chance, she related her life story and asked to meet in one year to receive Holy Communion. Another year after this second meeting, Zosimas returned to find her corpse in the same spot where he had last seen her. Rather than dry remains, her body was completely preserved\u200a\u2014\u200aa sign of her holiness in Christian tradition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Based on the mythology of Mary of Egypt, which maintains that after so many years in the desert she appeared as almost animal and indistinguishable from her environment, artistic depictions such as Donatello\u2019s sculpture Penitent Magdalene<\/em> (c. 1455) show her as an emaciated woman covered in long, coarse hair. Goldberg describes this sort of animal-environmental transformation as \u201ca microbial event; somehow the border of self has expanded.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Mercer Union, \u201cVideo Walkthrough.\u201d <\/span> The desert itself facilitates thinking through the value of a body in life, in death, or as something that has extended into its environment over a lifetime. This idea that the desert, normally an ecosystem hostile to life, is really a space of possibility for making and unmaking resonates with Goldberg, in terms of its potential for a miraculous event. Working against a Christian understanding that relies on the immaculate, unchanged state of a corpse, what if the immaculate is life giving life to even more life?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bronze casting is a significant and intentional choice for Goldberg, whose sculptural ethos rests on subverting the monumentality of certain materials. To her, a bronze sculpture is unstable and impermanent because it can be cut up and melted down. She starts in the wax state, building up from the interstitial period during which it is extremely sensitive to surface treatment. In the end, the physicality of the bronze sculpture walks a line between coming together and falling apart. Her Mary of Egypt figures demonstrate this in their loose forms, not fully seamed or attached where one might expect them to be, their skin impressed with motifs from crystal serving dishes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Deliberately questioning what is valued, devalued, or has the potential to be valued, Goldberg acts this out literally and materially through sculptural analogues alongside their \u201creal\u201d representations. Symbolizing the loaves that Mary of Egypt brought into the desert, Goldberg\u2019s two figures are surrounded by aluminum-coated baguettes next to their aluminum casts, with little indication of which is which without close inspection. Also, juxtaposing solid cast-aluminum cans and silver-painted cans dressed up as sculptural elements marks how easily either could be mistaken as a food commodity. Around the gallery, connecting these elements with suspended cables and wires, are partial frames of light-up vanity mirrors, which act as physical portals as well as analogues for the identification of Marilyn Monroe as a pin-up celebrity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Goldberg\u2019s aim in this body of work is to uproot the Mary of Egypt narrative from its conventional unfolding and give the subject agency. Although Donatello\u2019s Penitent Magdalene <\/em>depicts Mary of Egypt in a literal sense, his representation collapses the narrative of all of the Marys, as the Church had collapsed their subjectivities long before. Such removal of the representations of real lives from a historical record extends to restricting their participation as lived subjects. Creating a shared experience of asking these questions about an under-studied mode of historical revisionism within Christianity, Goldberg puts pressure on the matrix of iconography, worth, meaning, agency, and memory as we might normally expect it to function.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Goldberg\u2019s intention is not to create tidy adjacencies with which to metaphorically work things out; rather, she creates tension within certain compositions in order to ask these questions in the first place. The desert is ultimately about mythology and agency, sparking the narrative potential of transitional states. Through their conceptions of the desert, Povinelli and Goldberg are asking the same question: What counts as life and to whom? In Sun Moon Stars<\/em>, Goldberg challenged the criteria that we so often use to determine modes of relating with humans, objects, and environments, extending this inquiry into a subversion of the Christian tradition that bestows value on exalted death over embodied life. Accentuating the theme of transformation, this body of work privileges the miraculous and the elusive as they converge upon questions about human life. Even the barren desert makes room to suspend disbelief for magic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Toronto writer and editor Angel Callender\u2019s work can be found in C Magazine<\/em>, BlackFlash, Canadian Art<\/em>, and Cornelia<\/em>, and in Imagining Futures of Experimental Media<\/em> (Pleasure Dome, NIMAC & OddSite Arts, 2023) and Architecture and the Smart City<\/em> (Routledge, 2019).<\/p>\n![\"Rochelle-Goldberg_SunMoonStar\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/111_CR_Callander_Rochelle-Goldberg_SunMoonStar_002.jpg\")
Sun Moon Star,<\/em> exhibition view, 2023.
Photo: Vuk Dragojevic, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Rochelle-Goldberg_SunMoonStar\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/111_CR_Callander_Rochelle-Goldberg_SunMoonStar_05.jpg\")
Sun Moon Star,<\/em> exhibition view, 2023.
Photo: Vuk Dragojevic, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Rochelle-Goldberg_SunMoonStar\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/111_CR_Callander_Rochelle-Goldberg_SunMoonStar_06.jpg\")
Sun Moon Star,<\/em> exhibition view, 2023.
Photo: Vuk Dragojevic, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n