Artist
Nancy Goldring
(1945) American
Biography
Born in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and reared in St. Louis, Nancy Goldring graduated from Smith College in 1967. She spent a year in Italy on a Fulbright fellowship, and later enrolled in the MFA program at New York University. Then a sculptor and printmaker, she was a co-founder of SITE, or Sculpture in the Environment, an organization of artists interested in developing public art projects; but when the group's interests became increasingly commercial, Goldring redirected her energies. She is head of drawing and contemporary art at Montclair State University. Goldring's interest in the power of location and memory manifests itself in the technique she calls "foto-projection." A ceaseless photographer of her travels and a collector of other images with personal relevance, Goldring makes shallow-relief paper models based on her drawings. Multiple layers of transparencies related to her travels and memories are projected onto the front and back of the paper, which is suspended upright. The layered composition is visually flattened by the artist when the collage of images is re-photographed to create a final document. Goldring's work was included in a 1989 exhibition at the National Museum of American Art, The Photography of Invention: American Pictures of the 1980s, and a mid-career retrospective and accompanying monograph will be produced by the Southeast Museum of Photography in 2000.
Goldring's work is unique in its incorporation of drawing, models, photography, and slide projection. The Surrealist concept of the persistence of memory lingers in her color photographs, where multiple images glow simultaneously, bright and frozen, impermanent and translucent, intangible. Images of windows, doors, and other framing devices are often included in her photographs, inspiring in viewers a desire to move through and beyond the portal. Her work is a reminder of the vastness of our world.
Meredith Fisher
Handy et al. Reflections in a Glass Eye: Works from the International Center of Photography Collection, New York: Bulfinch Press in association with the International Center of Photography, 1999, p. 217.
Goldring's work is unique in its incorporation of drawing, models, photography, and slide projection. The Surrealist concept of the persistence of memory lingers in her color photographs, where multiple images glow simultaneously, bright and frozen, impermanent and translucent, intangible. Images of windows, doors, and other framing devices are often included in her photographs, inspiring in viewers a desire to move through and beyond the portal. Her work is a reminder of the vastness of our world.
Meredith Fisher
Handy et al. Reflections in a Glass Eye: Works from the International Center of Photography Collection, New York: Bulfinch Press in association with the International Center of Photography, 1999, p. 217.