On a frigid January afternoon, artist David Goldes stood in his studio, gazing at nichrome wire generally used in toasters woven through a diorama made of plywood panels. When electrified, the nichrome wire goes white hot, the structure almost burns down, and the artist takes a picture of this lit-up moment.
Goldes, who has been fascinated by electricity for as long as he can remember, originally trained as a biologist and chemist in the late 1960s and early '70s. The world of art was light years away at the time, not even on his radar. But one evening when he was in graduate school at Harvard, where he studied molecular genetics, something that a Nobel Prize-winning scientist said struck him.
"I went to a New Year's Eve party, and there were three Nobel Prize winners in the living room," he said. "And I said to myself, 'You know what, I'm never going to be that. I'm not. That's not me. I'm not brilliant.'"
After that, he got out of the science game but took his passion for electricity, chemistry and genetics to the world of visual art, pursuing a master of fine arts in photography from SUNY Buffalo. The drawings on display in his new solo exhibition "Unpredictable," now on view at Dreamsong Gallery, are a testament to that.
To make the drawings, Goldes — who worked as a professor of photography at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design for more than 30 years and is represented by Yossi Milo Gallery in New York — plays with electricity.
First, he draws on paper using graphite and/or silver leaf, being sure to leave small gaps between the marks. Then, he places a wire connected to a 15,000-volt source onto the paper and turns it on. The electricity hops around, burning through the gaps, conducted by the graphite or silver leaf. The result is surprising burns, holes and other mysterious, unpredictable marks.
In the print "Microbia," rust-colored, magenta and bluish blotches appeared inside circles and ovals of silver.
The unpredictable elements are everything.