JILL GOLDMAN
DISENTANGLEMENT/RE-EMBODIMENT

The Mildred Complex(ity)
37B Main Street / Narrowsburg / NY 12764

Opening reception / October 8 / 3 pm – 5 pm

Mildred's Lane and The Mildred Complex(ity) proudly present the installation Disentanglement/Re-embodiment by Los Angeles-based artist Jill Goldman.

In this new body of work—a response to two years of research into patriarchy—Goldman continues her ongoing exploration of transformative ritual and the gendered body. Developed at Mildred’s Lane during a residency in 2021, Disentanglement/Re-embodiment is an ambitious attempt to disentangle the bonds of gender-based oppression and imagine a re-embodied self, unencumbered by patriarchal power and domination. In videos, photographs and performances Goldman interrogates the intangible ways that patriarchy creates fictions of the body and then insists that these fictions are natural, essentializing socially constructed traits as biologically and divinely determined, thereby simultaneously constructing and compelling gendered realities.

While it's impossible to know if we can ever fully experience our bodies outside of the linguistic and patriarchal social institutions that not only regulate them but define them, Disentanglement/Re-embodiment challenges the viewer to take seriously the possibility of a self independent of a system based on power relations. In performances that use ropes and women's hair, music and dance, Goldman makes visible the invisible structures of patriarchy and attempts to untangle them, extricating female bodies from their insidious and subjugating webs. Goldman, a long-time activist who advocates for the rights of those marginalized by patriarchy is skilled at pragmatic resistance, fighting injustice from a position inside our political and social systems. In her art and Tantric meditation practice, however, she explores a more radical form of resistance, a resistance that is founded on an expansive consciousness that demolishes the oppressive structures the political right is so hellbent on solidifying.

The Sanskrit word Tantra derives from the verbal root tan, meaning to weave, and while Goldman attempts to unravel one fabric, she weaves another one, represented visually in videos and photographs printed on muslin in which the boundaries between the self and the world blur. From its origins in 6th century India, Tantric initiation has always been open to all genders and all social classes. With its revolutionary shapeshifting goddesses and panpsychism Tantra dissolves borders and erases binaries. By embracing this profoundly non-dualist consciousness, Goldman imagines a dematerialized liquid reality, an alchemical transformation that occurs in the world, via the body, revealing the sacred in the profane. Because this state of "oneness" entails a radical solidarity with every human, indeed, with every particle in the universe, the boundaries that separate the terrestrial from the numinous, the self from other, subject from object, collapse, and all hierarchies are razed. Patriarchy is rendered not only absurd but cosmically powerless.

-Asti Hustvedt

Jeffrey Jenkins Photography / Performers include Veronica Caudillo / Louise Hamagami / and Roxanne Steinberg / with music by Livia Reiner and Rose Reiner.