This chart describes four discreet, though complimentary, bodies of work:
A.) The Purger
inducing vulnerability in myself
B.) The Confessor
inviting vulnerability from others
C.) The Keeper
documenting vulnerability in my life
D.) The Collector
witnessing vulnerability in the lives of others

Transference & the Sacrifice of Comfort

On the Sacrifice of Comfort


Elise Goldstein is a performance and installation artist working to capture and provoke moments of intimacy between the artist, the work and the audience. Her practice is firmly rooted in historical research and site specificity. She examines the body out of control, as evidenced by moments of grief, fear, ecstasy, rage and syncope. She is courting the intense vulnerability that reduces our verbal communication to utterances.

Goldstein has a compulsion to witness the lives of others and reiterate evidences of abandoned self-control. By merging the histories of religious impulse and therapeutic practices, she urges the mind to forget itself - to relearn the preciousness of risk. Each interaction or work instigates a rupture in the expectation of exchange. This immediate sincerity provides an initiation point to recollect, to mourn the loss suffered by the ongoing distance between people and the internal distance we keep from ourselves.

Within these pieces, the body becomes a living sculptural object, a source for the re-envisioning of feminine character: the vessel, the caretaker, the martyr, the nag. Working with specific sites or communities allows these historically female exaggerations to become grounded in the responsibility of the “real”. While granting permission for both the redemptive and the indulgent, she explores attraction to the invisible made visible and the constant transmutation of imbued materials. Through encouraging confrontation with our own fragility, she offers viewers the chance to affect and to be affected, intimately.

In addition to working as an artist and educator, Goldstein has maintained a private hypnotherapy practice for the last several years, which continuously influences the aim of her work, research and relationship to language.