Parallel Channels
Adam Golfer & Katy McCarthy
October 5, 2024 — November 3rd, 2024
Underdonk Gallery191 Henry St., NYC
The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, unless it’s a river. Rivers possess the unique ability to elongate time and extend themselves by force. The autonomous flow of a river propels new waters through its parallel banks, but it accumulates old stories from the shores. You can try to map a route as scientifically as you want, but rivers will mystify even the best laid plans.
Parallel Channels features two new films by Adam Golfer and Katy McCarthy. The films explore the misalignment between nature and how we occupy it, transform it and remember it.
Golfer’s film, Magic Valley is set in present day reality, in the southernmost region of Texas, known as the Rio Grande Valley. The film moves wearily through the borderlands, often fixing its gaze on others, searching and looking. Birdwatchers congregate to silently praise local wildlife. Border patrol circle a militarized boundary where everyone is suspect. Native and migratory wildlife exist in a territory being rattled by human disputes and causations – migration, suburban sprawl, climate change – and cleaved apart by the construction of the wall that divides Texas from Mexico.
The film weaves an ethereal space of happenings along the river: crossings, bird watchers, conservationists, wildlife, border patrol apprehensions, radio broadcasts, wall construction sites, and surveillance technologies. We overhear fragments of conversation. These vignettes reveal a border control situation that is anathema to the natural flows of people and land. The consequences are mortal. These shards of experience depict the contradictions and banality of everyday life along the Rio Grande. The land is the land no matter where the river bends.
McCarthy guides us down a different river in Neches. We join an older woman, who experiences a quiet telepathy with the river. She is our river guide, although she can’t promise us answers. The river offers us the woman’s memories, as she recalls being a young girl warmly introduced to the spirit of the river by her mother. The film conflates time, slowly assembling a puzzle that is missing a final piece. The missing piece of Neches may be a demolished chunk of land adjacent to the river, or perhaps it’s the resolution we all crave about the past.
These films represent the latest works of two filmmakers dedicated to the excavation of time and the waters that run through its valleys.
Christian Hendricks, Curator
Traversing the Past:
Adam Golfer, Diana Matar, Hrvoje Slovenc
January 18, 2018 — April 1, 2018
Museum of Contemporary PhotographyColumbia College, Chicago
Traversing the Past: Adam Golfer, Diana Matar, Hrvoje Slovenc presents the work of three artists, all of whom trace their family stories to histories of political turmoil, violence, and displacement. In using personal experiences as starting points, the artists transform the autobiographical into a multivalent lens through which to view a subject that cannot be pinned to a single narrative.
Major world events are the rails on which family stories ride, causing movement, immigration, connections, separations. Wars, political violence, and other forms of trauma, in particular, can have strong impact on our family narratives, often in inextricable, inexplicable ways. Indeed, suffering can last for decades and echo for generations after the original event.
Our society organizes itself around the idea that the past is fixed, the future is open, and the present moment is constantly fleeting. But these notions of time are illusions. The past is at once an individual invention and a collective agreement. We traverse the past in our memories, our sense of identity, in ways that are not usually linear. Backward, forward. Clear, fuzzy.
Each of the three artists in this exhibition―Diana Matar, Hrvoje Slovenc, and Adam Golfer―looks at their life experiences, and the ways their sense of identity is linked, both directly and indirectly, to state-sponsored violence. Probing the Muammar Gaddafi regime’s 42-year rule of Libya, the war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and the legacy of World War II and the current conflict in Israel/Palestine, respectively, these artists demonstrate the ripple effects of political brutality and conflict. Along the way, they explore the stories and emotions that accompany such trauma—narratives and feelings that often span multiple generations of societal and family lore.
Karen Irvine
Deputy Director and Chief Curator, MoCP
MFA Thesis Exhibition - Spring 2016
A House Without a Roof
April 21, 2016 - May 8, 2016
City University of New York at Hunter College205 Hudson Street Gallery
New York, NY
A House Without a Roof
July 10, 2015 - September 5, 2015
Booklyn Artists Space37 Greenpoint Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
Booklyn is pleased to present the solo-exhibition of artist Adam Golfer’s recent work in film, photography, text, and collected archival material.
Golfer’s family history – its memories, objects, and mythologies – becomes material for taking stock in the divergent iterations of global narratives.
A House Without a Roof concerns the strands of history connecting the Jewish Diaspora out of Europe and forced mass migrations from Palestine following WWII with the creation of the State of Israel. The book associated with the exhibition loosely traces the triangular relationship between Golfer’s grandfather – a survivor of Dachau, his father – who lived on a kibbutz in the early 1970s, and the artist – caught between the membrane of histories that turned the oppressed into oppressors and residents into refugees. A House Without a Roof negotiates the splintered narratives of war and displacement between Europe, Israel/Palestine, and the United States.
The exhibition also includes the video piece, Router (2017), a work that epitomizes Golfer’s hybrid approach to art and filmmaking. Router shifts between the actions of two subjects; a New York performance artist, and a German WWII reenactor, creating a distinctly separate dialogue by way of the space between them.
A House Without a Roof was begun in 2011. Its sense of “rooflessness”, of disjointed familiarity, – architecturally, historically, and politically questioning one’s sense of being planted – hovers throughout Golfer’s book, use of imagery, and in the uncertainty of the space between the two characters in Router. As in the reading of the book’s text, one memory is often redirected by the addition of another. One’s ability to locate era, subject or speaker (third and first-person voices diverge and overlap) is complicated by a perpetual relocation of literary devices.
Janna Dyk
Program Director and Curator, Booklyn