Guy Goldstein\u2019s work engages with transitions in medium between sound, form, color, and time, and the by-products of this translation. As a visual artist who also writes and composes music, his work draws on the affinities between the visual and the sonic, employing materials and tools of music and sound. In recent years Goldstein has begun exploring the \u201ccolors of noise\u201d\u2014tonal frequencies in varying intensity and speed, in analogy to the color scale resulting from different degrees of light refraction; He works with power tools and other devices, such as drills, fans, and a clock, to create drawings which represent light and sound frequencies, converting sound to a visual element and vice versa.
\nMusic is a major player in his exhibition, as background, subject, and character. The show originated in a record (Memorable Equinox) created by Goldstein during his residency in Northern Ireland in the autumn of 2015. His research on the \u201ccolors of noise\u201d was expanded to the violence- and strife-ridden environment and the local color of life in it. In the three-channel video installation Silence isn\u2019t Very Much, created especially for the current exhibition, the album\u2019s songs are played alongside texts, actions, characters, and landscapes associated with questions of \u201cnoise\u201d and \u201cinterruption\u201d; the noise, however, does not emerge as a strident disruption, but rather as an atmosphere imbued with pain, hardship, and trauma. The music is also present in Theme Tonight \u2026\u2014an independent production by Goldstein for Samuel Beckett\u2019s radio play Words and Music, in which he played the two characters entitled \u201cWords\u201d and \u201cMusic\u201d, in addition to composting and performing the music (in collaboration with producer Avichai Tuchman). The play addresses the tools of the radiophonic medium, the tension between words and music evolving into a song. Beautiful Isle of Somewhere explores yet another musical means, the pianola\u2014a music-playing device which preceded the gramophone, whereby piano keys are moved using a mechanism operated according to musical data on a perforated paper roll (piano roll).
\nGoldstein\u2019s variegated body of work scrutinizes narrative configurations which stretch over different, distorted temporal axes. Music joins text and image in such media as drawing, video, and animation, whose interrelations range between seeing and hearing, and between showing and telling. The narrator, as a voice, is the character leading a narrative which is not a mere plot, but rather a matrix for the arrangement of external and internal realities in the viewer\u2019s experience. Layers of data are superimposed, eliciting questions about sequence and order, truth and fiction. Goldstein patches and crosses data and tenses while oscillating between sounds and silences on his way to a solution or a resolution. The viewer\u2019s senses wriggle between listening and viewing, \u201cOnce, a Beat, Second Hit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\t\t