Making his debut solo museum exhibition at MOAH Cedar, Nikolas Soren Goodich weaves complex glowing stories that mix light, vivid color, and symbolic abstraction. Creating works that both literally and figuratively glow, the artist’s Luminous Mysteries/Human Symmetries combine a sense of both dream and reality.
The museum show offers an encompassing look at the artist’s work, and provides an immersive walk-through of images that seem to move with the viewer’s eye. The illuminated effects of Goodich’s art make many of his works feel wildly alive.
Particularly impressive are his large scale works “Luminous Mysteries/Human Symmetries Ground One and Ground Two”. This two-sided work is kiln-fired glass paint on tempered glass and acrylic on plexiglass in an aluminum frame. Mysteriously embedded LED lights and a transformer make the pieces pop to neon shades; the sunshine of an amber and gold palette blazes to the eye.
His work flows and spins, both captivating and startling the viewer in its vivid coloration and intricacy. Some works are only layers of plexiglass, others are plexiglass panels layered onto canvas. Some are more figurative, such as the twinned red faces in “Untitled New Psychedelic Diptych” and “Humananimal 1.” “Doppelganger” in another dazzler, an acrylic on plexiglass work with embedded LED lights.
Some works include both Goodich’s painting and printmaking techniques. His process takes the different surfaces of plexiglass and kiln-fired glass into account, making fine use of both the reflective surfaces and their transparency as well as how they fuse with light.
These are fierce, smart images that feature bold color. He applies colors directly onto the surface of one glass panel and hand monoprints onto the next, creating images that seem to be woven together, fluid yet geometric; layered not just in paint but in light. The experience of viewing many of these images, whether they contain embedded LEDs or they do not, is as if light was stitched in between the layers.
He has described his paintings as touching upon physics, biology, chemistry, geography, consciousness, and philosophy. It’s his wish to make his work healing, both in the visual and emotional sense. He himself has healed from a harsh past, but is still reflective of that journey. As an artist, it’s the resilience and fragility of the human spirit, the wisdom of self-reflection, and his own emergence as if from a chrysallis of pain into his life as an artist. This metaphor is often present in works that feature a butterfly-like, twinned/winged image.
In fact, his personal path is entwined with his artwork, and just as his own difficult personal trajectory has changed, the art itself can seem mutable, depending upon the environment in which they are located, as well as the time of day in which they are viewed, shifting one’s experience of them. He notes that his own layering of glass interacts with space and light – as well as with the mood of a space of the mood of the viewer.
While the inner glow of these works is manifest at MOAH Cedar, it is perhaps even more stunning outdoors in an installation at Palm Desert’s Melissa Morgan Fine Arts. Viewing his work at both locations fully explores Goodich’s own perception of art as mirroring the internal and external at work in all of us, with the figurative represented in the portraiture embedded in his work, and the abstract, also vitally present in his work, and perhaps more aligned with our own inchoate spirituality.
Goodich’s personal history, both culturally and racially as Black and Jewish, his survival of the trauma of addiction and homelessness, and his personal resurrection as an artist is certainly one part of his art. But he extrapoloates forward into broader questions of justice, identity, toxicity, and healing — with the cure to all the world’s ills, as well as his own personal past darkness, being light.
The 22 works at MOAH Cedar, all created within the last five years, are truly reflective: of light, the magic of simply being alive, and how we see ourselves and others. They are mirrors of the artist’s psyche, of our own, and of the environment. Presented at the museum as a collection of two series of work, Double Inverted Portraits and Luminous Symmetries, both are transformative and alchemic.
As noted, Goodich’s large scale two-sided edge-lit public artwork, “Luminous Mysteries Human Symmetries Ground Two,” is on permanent display in Palm Desert. Both high and low desert destinations are well worth a drive to feel the Goodrich glow.
The MOAH Cedar exhibition runs through November 24th with an artist’s talk with critic and curator Shana Nys Dambrot on November 16th at 2 p.m.
The installation at Melissa Morgan Fine Art is positioned permanently.
- Genie Davis; photos provided by the artist and Laura Grover; additional images by Genie Davis