Eva Gold
Shadow Lands
March 15 - April 20, 2024
Power is a thing of the senses. It lives of a capacity, or a yearning, or a festering resentment. It can be sensualized in night rages. It can begin as a secret kept or as a gesture glimpsed in a hallway. - Kathleen Stewart in ‘Ordinary Affects’
Silke Lindner is pleased to present Shadow Lands, the first U.S. solo exhibition by London-based artist Eva Gold. Driven by an ongoing interest in power, Eva Gold explores how its dynamics and structures unfold in the social and political environments we live in. Composed of three elements, the exhibition encompasses a suite of drawings, a circular formation of chairs, and a site-specific installation of barbed wire suspended from wall to wall throughout the gallery space. Linked through psychological realms, Gold’s multimedia installation maps out connections through sensory experiences that navigate feelings of uncertainty, helplessness, unease and distrust. Materiality, image and the relationship between the works hold cues to ambiguous narratives, completed by the viewer and informed by the potentials that the objects hold.
Often approaching her work through a cinematic lens, the imagery of her meticulously soft yet stern drawings derives from a scene of Michael Haneke’s 1992 film Benny’s Video. Dissecting the tracking shot of a row of choir boys, shot low from behind so only their back and hands are visible, each drawing shows the passing of money from one hand to the next. Removed from the violent context of the film, the drawings retain an underhand quality that lingers silently behind its surface.
Inside the suite of drawings stands a circle of folding chairs, made of found metal and plastic structures with handcrafted, woven and embossed brown leather seating. Reminiscent of a 70s aesthetic, the seats are empty, turned towards one another, the circle is closed. Its formation recalls settings found among shared communities and ideologies, safe spaces within recovery and support groups. The title of the work, Echo Chamber, suggests a less optimistic setting of a group in which like-minded people have turned their backs, their voices attuned, reverberating in affirming loops.
Zooming in and out between detail and larger picture, Eva Gold seamlessly shifts focus between the personal and public. Underneath the sharp fences that impendingly hover closely above our heads, between found objects and Gold’s own fabrications, violence and intimacy stand in close contact. What lingers is a vague tension that quietly cuts through the space. Both a tool and a weapon, the power of secrecy structures both Gold’s work and the hierarchies within our lives. Implicating the hands of many: from the top down it can hide, corrupt, cover up and divide. From the bottom up it has the capacity to connect, encourage and offer spaces of trust and care. In Eva Gold’s work, the boundaries are less defined. Tempting her audience onto precarious grounds that destabilize truth and fiction, she challenges us to reassess what moves us and our senses.
Eva Gold (b.1994 in Manchester, UK) lives and works in London. She received a BA from Goldsmiths, London, and a Postgraduate Diploma from the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Recent solo - and two person exhibitions include City of Rooms, a two person exhibition with Louise Bourgeois at Rose Easton, London (Part One) and a concurrent show at The Shop - Sadie Coles HQ, London (Part Two) (2023), Slow Dance at Eigen + Art Lab, Berlin (2022) and The Last Cowboys at Ginny on Frederick, London, (2022). Recent group exhibitions include ‘The Living House’ at Van Gogh House, London, ‘Ideal Shapes of Disappearing’ at Silke Lindner and ‘Barely Furtive Pleasures’, Nir Altman, Munich, among others.