At the end of the first hallway on the right on either side of an arched doorway rest two cold cast steel skulls: Cornu Sapiens & Monu Sapiens. They sit on top of black fabric, bordered in lace which hangs over a black pedestal, about three and a half feet from the ground. This display makes these skulls appear important, seeming to replicate a museums installation. The dark bronze color of the skulls blends with the black fabric and pedestal they rest upon, encouraging viewers to look more closely and appreciate the rippled texture on the slight sheen of the steel. These subtleties reveal the nature of the steel itself and keep the works honest to their medium .
The subject matter is just as “heavy” as the material these pieces were made from. Goldfinch shows this by placing the labels on the fabric directly in front of each skull. This is consistent with the direct titles that serve to classify these artifact-like fictions. Cornu Sapiens is displayed on the left and naturally the first to be noticed. It has predominantly human characteristics, together with a horn, longer than the skull itself, protruding from the middle of its upper forehead at a 45 degree angle. Monu Sapiens, on the right, is slightly smaller and has an obliquely angled cone beveled in the middle of its forehead in the same fashion as the eye sockets in Cornu Sapiens. This large socket leaves it up to the imagination of the viewer to formulate what a pool-ball sized eye would look like in the middle of a human forehead. Her fictional reality comes to life in our imaginations as we read the titles again and realize that this is only one instance of each Genus. Where, we wonder, are their friends, their offspring, their living relatives?
Matthew Baughman