Pamela Golden: Phantom Creeps

8 Sep-29 Oct 2022

PV 8 Sep 2022, 6-8pm

Overview

Golden exposes these changes which in turn reveal the universal concerns of the human psyche and how the zeitgeist is formed. Her cross-temporal paintings, taken from the key series that make up her practice, question how each generation assigns value to an image, and shows how Golden re-imagines her source materials: film stills, photographs, signifiers she chooses from the library of popular culture. Through this process she manipulates the viewer’s experience, uncovering hidden truths and revealing new narratives and cultural anxieties around aspects of visual culture.

Each of the four rooms of the gallery contain paintings from a distinct series. In gallery one You Know I’ve Been at Sea Before is a series of paintings begun in 1997 that is concerned with people and the sea. These works reference historic images from 1900-1960 and many of the images contain the fingers and hands of those who were there documenting the moment. The title is a line from a Joni Mitchell song. This series was first shown at Galerie Reckermann, Koln in 1998 and then at Gimpel Fils London.
In gallery two are paintings of auctions from an ongoing series begun in 1990. These are social history paintings that reflect the ongoing heightened arena of the auction rooms. In gallery three a series of botanical paintings refer to early photographic techniques. They can be considered as a channel to propose questions about our shared contemporary and problematic dynamics of how we perceive the world through mediated sources and how historic photography pioneered a change to painting and how it is perceived. This series was begun in Scotland during the recent lockdowns.

In gallery four is Phantom Creeps. The title of this series is also the title of this exhibition and alludes to those who are/aren’t there, who came before us and the narratives surrounding them. It consists of over 200 watercolours of properties that were for sale in Paris between 2006/7. The title ‘The Phantom Creeps’ comes from the 1939 horror/sci fi series starring Bela Lugosi. It also alludes to Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on phantasmagoria and his reflections on commodity culture and its experience of material and intellectual products. This series explores both the spaces we inhabit and those spaces we aspire to inhabit. This series of work (completed in 2022) is shown for the first time.