Paula Goldman

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Artist statement

My work explores the role of photography in memorializing artifacts, blurs the line between popular forms of collecting and institutional archives, and plays with the narratives created by the arbitrary juxtapositions of images. I am interested in the relationship between memories and objects, and how that is enhanced by the act of photographing. Photography changes objects by its very nature—by instantly removing things from their original time and space and depositing them elsewhere—much like placing something in a collection. I play with scale, juxtaposition, and different modes of presentation to manipulate the meanings of the things I photograph. People’s relationships to their possessions are complicated, particularly in a consumer culture. Objects are assigned value depending on who is evaluating them. This is true not only for individuals, but also for nations, cultures, religions, and any collector. My pleasure in exploring objects and their meanings has been the freedom to create my own collections, with my own symbolic hierarchies. Advertisers and autocrats effectively employ scale to influence how images are received. I printed the objects in Monuments quite large, allowing things like dog toys and kids’ art projects to become monumental. The small folding books I made from my Monuments and Specimens series created tiny museums of my “collections” that could fit in someone’s pocket. I am also interested in how display techniques influence how images “read”, and...

Artwork