CURRENT EXHIBIT

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Mood Indigo, Saudade. 

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by  BR Goldstein

March 16 - April 27, 2025

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ARTIST'S RECEPTION 

Sunday,  March 16, 2025 

from 2 to 4 pm

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In 2018 I started making textile work as a form of painting. Since then, I have kept every remnant from my projects. In 2023, I had to return suddenly to my hometown of Toronto, Canada, leaving behind the life, home, and studio I had spent seven years building. The work in this exhibition is composed of these remnants—pieces from past projects, household linens, and materials I gathered for future work at the Scrap Exchange and Trosa in Durham. These fragments have now traveled 1,500 miles with me.

 

This project captures the moment of dissolution—the point when the structures, habits, and frameworks that once sustained my life, both practical and emotional, began to break down. The mechanisms I had relied upon disappeared, leaving me to confront instability and disorder.

 

My work engages with repurposed, low-quality, disposable industrial textiles—materials that are embedded in daily life yet designed for obsolescence. Textile waste is offshored; we ease our conscience through donation, only for these discarded materials to become another burden for communities overseas. Every scrap in this body of work has been hand-dyed with indigo, a slow, layered process requiring 10–20 dips to achieve the deepest colors. The machine stitching, used as a dye resist, becomes a form of mark-making—a record of my presence.

 

At the core of my practice is an engagement with the physical properties of materials as the primary driver of form. My process is shaped by the inherent qualities of these textiles—their origins, structural irregularities and the dyes I have used in past projects. I do not erase the asymmetries of found materials but instead allow them to dictate the composition. My actions emphasize texture, surface, and transformation over time, resisting the impulse to impose control.

 

I am a member of a textile art co-operative in Toronto, where many members work with indigo in some form, having studied its use with craftspeople in India, Pakistan, Denmark, and Japan. This co-operative has become my artistic home, and indigo has come to symbolize this place.

 

At the same time, indigo is deeply tied to the history of North Carolina—once cultivated as a cash crop, later imported to dye the denim that became synonymous with one of America’s most ubiquitous inventions. Its burdened history is intertwined with labor, industry, and cultural identity.

 

Fraying and decay have always signified systemic collapse in my work. Saudade, a Portuguese word with no direct English equivalent describes a profound longing an ache for something lost, whether a person, a time, or a place, with the quiet understanding that what is longed for will never return. In this sense, saudade is a form of grief—born of displacement and disruption—and is analogous to the historical moment in which we find ourselves.

 

My heartfelt gratitude to Syd Wood for all her assistance with this project and the support and knowledge of the members of the Contemporary Textile Studio Co-op of Toronto, Canada.

 

 

 

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Other than the reception,

this exhibit may be viewed in person by appointment only.

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For appointments, please contact:

Nerys Levy: neryslevy@gmail.com

Tama Hochbaum: tamahochbaum19@gmail.com

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