Bi-racial artist Nikolas Soren Goodich is an emerging figure with a rising public profile in Los Angeles and all of Southern California, with work featured in collections worldwide. On September 28, his first solo museum exhibition “Luminous Mysteries/Human Symmetries” opens at the Moah Cedar galleries of the Lancaster Museum of Art and History with an artist’s reception from 4-6PM. The exhibition runs through November 24. An artist’s talk with arts writer and critic Shana Nys Dambrot will be scheduled, date TBD.
In Luminous Mysteries/Human Symmetries at Moah Cedar Goodich explores paradoxes of human perception, using symmetry and asymmetry in his gender, race, and age fluid hand mono-printed profile portraits on glass. These twenty-two luminous glass paintings, made in the last five years, present symbolic portraiture married to organic abstraction, metaphors for how we see ourselves and one another, mirrors allowing us moments of quiet contemplation and close examination.
“Pictured: Entheogenic and Kindred” Spirit_Both SIde B_In Situ
Layering plexiglass and glass, often in frames embedded with LED lights, these works operate as prints, paintings, sculptures, and as architecture or public art, achieving totally unique and original transcendent and incandescent formal qualities. With electric light as a medium in some of the works, they are glass paintings that literally glow from within.
In his statement for the show, Goodich asks, “When we look into mirrors, what do we see? Can we choose to see more? And by making that choice, can we heal from trauma? Greek philosopher Socrates said, ‘Know Thyself.’ How can we do that without both literally and figuratively looking at who we really are…individually and as a species?”
Works from Goodich’s two series presented at Moah Cedar, Double Inverted Portraits and Luminous Symmetries, are born from intimate contemplation of both our most private human traumas, and divisions and traumas we all share. In seeking to help us transform that trauma, his works present an opportunity to find authentic connections within the art and with one another.
