Sybil Goldstein

Curated by: John Armstrong and Moira Clark

16 March 1995 - 15 April 1995
Opening Reception 16 March 1995 8pm

Foyer:

one work…There will be time…

One Work is a series of exhibitions that responds to the possibilities of MErcer Union’s new location. Individual artworks will be exhibited in the various spaces outside of the two formal galleries. These spaces include the stairwell, the windows and the foyer area.

Sybil Goldstein’s large-scale painting There will be time… (1995) is a portrait of a mother and child. Goldstein challenges this art historical motif by reversing the viewer’s traditional relationship to painted representations of maternity – to present a woman’s view of herself. The mother whose head is cropped off by the edge of the canvas, looks down at her own body and at her child while she is breastfeeding. The intimate proximity offered by this point of view is shared by both the mother and the viewer. Through this female gaze the breasts are not seen as erotic but as nurturing aspects of female sexuality. Goldstein’s title refers to the necessity of a woman having to come to terms with time – the time required to have a child, the time in one’s life to be a mother and the time which must be created for a child’s needs.

Sybil Goldstein is a Toronto artist whose paintings over the past fifteen years have variously treated the figure, mythologies, and the Canadian landscape. She was a member of the 1980s artist collective Chromazone, and has exhibited in Ontario, Quebec, and internationally. She was the co-curator of OKROMAZOME in Berlin in 1982 and Fire and Ice in Zurich in 1985. She is a member of the Red Head Gallery artist collective.