Yves B. Golden’s The Burden

A solo show curated by Seta Morton

 

Opening June 22, 2024 at the new home of Feminist Center for Creative Work

 

“Yves B. Golden is an artist whose work gleams at multiple intersections of media, including sculpture and embodiment, activism and curation, written word and sound, installation and performance.” — Seta Morton

 

 

Feminist Center for Creative Work is thrilled to announce the opening of our first Artist In Residence exhibit in our brand new space — a collection of sculptural works and a series of programs by Yves B. Golden, curated by Seta Morton. The exhibit, Golden’s first solo show, addresses the importance of fighting for humanity and dignity, amidst the violence of Western imperialism and our everyday lives. Within the traditions of Black feminist pedagogy as transformative praxis, The Burden aims to soften our senses while sharpening our teeth and tongues around the shape of disarmament. The show draws its title from a negro spiritual “Down by the Riverside,” and references the burden of attempting to learn and understand the ways of a violent world.

The works in the exhibit are primarily made of glass and comprise a delicate armory that serve as sculptural and textual provocations. Through a series of programs, Golden is bringing dancers, writers, and artists in her community, including Gogo Graham and Myssi Robinson, to be in conversation with the work, and we’re inviting audiences to engage with the questions of this show: How do we understand or, when necessary, reclaim our human rights (or the human rights of others) in the wake of war? Is global disarmament achievable without a universal understanding of dignity?

 

Artist Statement by Yves B. Golden

 

People like to believe every human being is born with the right to prosper, to self-identify, to live without shame amongst others without the threat of annihilation. However, Western imperialism and its rippling effect on the globe produces a reality where these rights, in any instant, can be confiscated and refused in the name of profit, expansion, bigotry, racism, etc. The world continues to shift further away from the universal and divinely granted dignity embedded in every soul. How do we understand or, when necessary, reclaim our human rights (or the human rights of others) in the wake of war? How is global disarmament achievable without a universal understanding of dignity?

Dignity materializes when it’s evoked and rooted in a visual language people can identify with. People understand and perform transactions at an exponential rate – those transactions are all embedded with a visual language based on magic and alchemy. Poetry, the hijacking and rearranging of language, may disrupt the cycle of ceaseless transactions, which turn people into commodities, digits, and instead, help us arrive at a universal understanding of human worth. Growing up under the leadership of critically engaged elders grounded us in storytelling/public speaking, grassroots organizing and cooperative economics which taught me that words and how you share them with others can shake people to their cores, in everlasting ways. Throughout my practice, I’ve collaged symbols and language through mixed media sculpture, performance, screenprinting and community activism. 

Making an impact means moving intentionally as we straddle the line between “craft” and the hard truth. Fargo Nissim Tbakhi says that “craft…is a counter revolutionary machine” which reproduces ethical failures. I plan to cultivate a conversation with this work and subsequent programming (readings, guided meditation for mindfulness, community therapy) which address disarmament, dismantling the counter revolutionary machine, and being unflinchingly radical, armed with the truth, in the wake of converging humanitarian catastrophes. As artists and writers, we must not let the imperial core reduce our offerings to “craft” – defanged and apolitical. 

 

Curatorial Statement by Seta Morton

 

Gonna lay down my burden
Down by the riverside
Study war no more

Yves B. Golden’s The Burden,  “as in the burden you lay down” she explains, draws it’s title from a negro spiritual “Down by the Riverside.” An apt title for Golden, whose body of work both attends and surrenders to the fluidity of water and, with this exhibition, demands demilitarization. Within the traditions of Black feminist pedagogy as transformative praxis, The Burden aims to soften our senses while sharpening our teeth and tongues around the shape of disarmament. 

For her first solo exhibition, Golden is building an armory of all things glass, granular, and fragile. Rendering swords and weapons out of glass, within this collection of new sculptures and poetics, Golden invokes the Book of Isaiah—“and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” As the precarity of our human rights becomes more and more weaponized, The Burden tends to the inherent dignity of all humans, the symbolism of images, the materiality of objects and the human rituals that imbue them with meaning. Within this exhibition and its activations, both the objects and their makers will find a protective space for all that they are — delicate, sacred, precious, and otherwise shatter-able. 

 

Bios

 

Yves B. Golden is a poet and artist based in Los Angeles. She uses mixed media sculpture, performance, sound, and olfaction to unpack questions of human worth, dignity, and transmutation. Golden pulls from natural processes to articulate the flow and obstruction of converging histories — curing objects in reactive fluids to physically break down language and to transmute the temporal into symbolic sculptures. Her poethical practice is rooted in media literacy, critical pedagogy, and global disarmament. Her work has been shown in Jupiter Artland, Scotland, Yaby, Madrid, and The New Museum, NYC. 

 

 

 

Seta Morton is an interdisciplinary curator, writer, and artist based in Lenapehoking (New York, NY). She is the Program Director/Associate Curator at Danspace Project and the managing editor of Danspace’s print and digital publications. Alongside Judy Hussie-Taylor, Executive Director and Chief Curator of Danspace, Seta has curated numerous artist commissions, programs, and projects. Seta’s curatorial practice is grounded in somatics, collaborative practice, and Black feminist thought. Seta’s written and embodied works live in the tremble between iteration, fermentation, and intergenerational memory.