The exhibit will showcase unique works of art by San Francisco-based artist Daniel Goldstein, who was the featured artist at the 2010 International AIDS Conference in Vienna, Austria where his sculptures made up of everyday HIV-related objects were highlighted. His woodblock prints, collages and sculptures have been exhibited in leading galleries and museums throughout the world.
AIDS also informs Daniel Goldstein’s sculpture, Medicine Man, which seems to straddle the line between despair about lives lost and hope for longevity, is a totemlike figure made of hundreds of empty medication bottles and dozens of syringes donated by HIV patients, forming a new whole out of the lives of many.
The gym equipment was covered in leather. Years of human weight, sweat and repetitive friction had abraded and marked them. I was able to obtain many of these skins (as I took to calling them) after the machines had been replaced by newer, vinyl-covered models. The mysterious and often abstracted human forms that had been imprinted on the leather reminded me of medieval relics.
Artist Daniel Goldstein and his team are interviewed about the making of “Medicine Man for South Africa”, a new suspended sculpture made of HIV/AIDS bottles, syringes and glass-beaded spindles representing various side-effects of the medications. Below the figure is a paper disk in which side-effects are written in colors corresponding to the spindles. These were created by brilliant S. African craftspeople who are part of the Umcebo Trust program. Visitors are encouraged to write about their own side-effects and experiences with HIV meds on this disk. This sculpture is included in the NOT ALONE exhibit which is a part of of MAKE ART STOP AIDS, an international traveling program/exhibition of artworks relating to global HIV/AIDS issues.
"Good Friday" at MOCRA
The artwork by Goldstein similarly shows the struggles played out by the human body for the sake of becoming more godlike, at least by contemporary society’s standards. The work is composed of a leather covering for a workout bench, the brand name Icarian. The covering was salvaged from a gym in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood at a pivotal time during the AIDS epidemic.