By Khalida Sarwari
Sometimes what you’re looking for can be found at the end of a … garbage dump? Well, that was true, at least for artist James Gouldthorpe whose immersive new installation at the Montalvo Arts Center has roots in a 1941 yearbook he found in a trash bin about 10 years ago.
Gouldthorpe was doing an artist residency at the Recology recycling plant in San Francisco between 2005 and 2006 when he was assigned to do a project using an item he found in a garbage can. He happened upon a yearbook that he then used to create portraits of the senior class.
The idea behind the project later served as the basis for Gouldthorpe’s massive 2,000-piece installation at Montalvo called “Particles: A Painting in Ten Chapters,” which weaves a narrative of human experience and reflects on both the poignant and absurd nature of existence.
The exhibit is made up of photographs that the artist has collected from a variety of sources, including his high school yearbooks, his family’s old snapshots and even the discarded photos of strangers.
Through a series of mixed media paintings arranged in 10 thematic groupings, the artist explores the passage of time and the accumulation of the self over a lifetime, projecting into the future but also reaching back into the past. He combines humor with melancholy as he explores birth, childhood, adolescence, middle and old age and death.
“The idea was to look at a lifetime through sort of the mundane events that everybody goes through,” he said.
Drawing inspiration from the graphic novel and realist painters’ depictions of modern American life, Gouldthorpe’s new body of work continues his ongoing investigation into the relationship between painting and narrative.
He developed “Particles” starting in 2014 while he was an Irvine Fellow at the Lucas Artist Program. It was a period of self-reflection for the artist, who was turning 50 and was sending his son off to college.
“I found myself reflecting on my life, searching for those moments–both significant milestones and more subtle shifts–that had shaped my sense of self over the years,” he said. “I also began looking ahead and thinking about aging. Inevitably I began to consider the weighty questions: What does it all matter in the end? What, if any, traces do you leave behind once you pass on?”
The exhibit is free and will be up in the Project Space Gallery Thursdays through Mondays from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. through May 29. There is a typewriter on site for guests to leave comments and feedback. Even though the content is autobiographical, Gouldthorpe said it is important to him that viewers can find something within it that resonates with them.
“That’s kind of my favorite part–how people respond to the work [and find] their own history in it,” he said.
On May 27, Montalvo will host a conversation with Gouldthorpe and Lynn Freed at 6 p.m. in the Historic Villa. Gouldthorpe will discuss his new work and Freed, a Lucas Artists Program Fellow and acclaimed writer, will read excerpts from her short fiction and memoir. The program is free for Montalvo members and $10 for non-members.
Gouldthorpe is a Richmond-based artist and senior conservation technician at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He received a bachelor of fine arts degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art and master of fine arts degree from Mills College. He has also studied art at Parsons Paris.
To learn more about Gouldthorpe, visit his website at jgouldthorpe.com.
