Gregory Lind Gallery is proud to present Connie Goldman’s Compass, a series of oil-on-panel paintings that uncover themes of interconnectedness, origin, harmony, chaos, and our tenuous place in the universe. Goldman has a distinctively reductivist formal vocabulary; she works with a minimalistic palette and clearly defined forms that maintain idiosyncratic angled relationships to the canvases themselves. These are works that embody an intellectual and emotional response to the world and reflect an engagement with music, architecture, linguistics, and science—mirroring both basic and complex natural phenomena and the tension and interplay between stasis and flux, constancy and change.

Despite their starkness and minimalism, Goldman’s paintings have a soothing and contemplative impact. The perceptual shift offered by these works verges on metaphysical insight and a transcendent awareness of space and form.

Among her inspirations for this series, Goldman has mentioned the humbling concept of time and the reminder that “our human minds are limited in our ability to not only grasp but also to acknowledge the limits of our bodies and perceptions.”

The guiding concept of the compass for this body of work emerged from its connection to boundaries and peripheries—constructs imposed by humans to help us feel situated and safe in a universe that is beyond our comprehension in terms of size, time, and scope.

During Goldman’s creative process, she considered the impulses behind the creation of human-made ordering devices such as constellations, maps, and timelines including family histories and heredity. While the works point to the human need to order the chaos of our existence into navigable schemes, they are also steeped in the omnipresent threat of an impending loss of balance. Each piece reflects how tenuous equilibrium and “certainty” actually are. Goldman’s oeuvre is a commentary on the obsessive human need to know and order the universe. “It mirrors the dis-ease of mortality,” she has said. “And it makes concrete our present, past, and future connections to our origins.”

Connie Goldman was born in El Paso, Texas. She holds an MFA in painting and drawing from the San Francisco Art Institute and a BA in psychology from the University of Texas at Austin. Goldman taught at San Francisco State University, San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts, and at Santa Rosa Junior College for the better part of two decades. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and has work in public and private collections, including the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Crocker Art Museum, the Laguna Beach Art Museum, the El Paso Museum of Art. Goldman lives and works in Petaluma, CA.

• Press release (PDF)