In “Dearest Earth, Darkest Sky” at Dreamsong Gallery, artist David Goldes gives us stark, harrowing landscapes that seem like they could be views of the apocalypse if they weren’t drawn from the horrors of the world today. 

Layering molding paste, acrylic and graphite onto paper, Goldes’ sculptural mixed media works evoke images we see on the news of wars around the world and speak to the cavalcade of global pandemics, fascism and environmental disaster we face. This is work that leans into the bleak state of things. 

I stopped into the exhibit on a blistery cold night last Friday. It was the weekend before the inauguration, and Israel had just agreed to a ceasefire in Gaza. I felt a sense of looming change in the air. 

In one piece, “Telling Surfaces” (2024), Goldes uses textured scratch marks to create the earth with giant craters opening up in two places. The sky above is foreboding with splotchy, misty black clouds. Goldes drew on images of Gaza’s landscape after an Israeli bombing attack.“I thought it was time to move away from abstraction,” he told me. “I mean, there’s so much in the world.” 

Goldes’ previous solo show at Dreamsong featured his graphite drawings through which he ran electrical currents, creating singe marks. “Dearest Earth, Darkest Sky” features two drawings with burnt edges of that earlier body of work, but for the most part the show veers into an entirely new direction. “I’m not a painter,” Goldes told me. “I’m not coming from painting. So this was a big surprise for me, and it was exciting to try.”

Starting with a piece of paper, Goldes uses a spatula to layer on molding paste and acrylic, and eventually adds graphite to the surface. 

I’ve often wondered when an artist decides when it’s time to move on from a particular set of techniques to something new. He told me that in this case for him, the beginnings of the change were when he was in Paris in 2023 and went to see a retrospective of Mark Rothko paintings at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. He was struck by the last paintings in particular, in a room that featured black and white paintings Rothko created at the end of his life before his death by suicide. To Goldes, the paintings looked like landscapes. 

In “Earth Memory” (2024), a plume erupts from the ground, spewing jaggedy lines into the gray sky. It’s somewhat more ambiguous than the bomb site pieces. The image could be an explosion, but it also could be oil shooting out of the earth.

Other paintings are even more elusive in their meaning. “From Above” features a floating object that looks like it could be the shape of a tooth. Goldes told me people who visited the gallery thought it looked like anything from a meteor to a tooth, or perhaps a life form from another place. Whatever the thing is, it’s quite ominous, floating in wait in the air. 

I think my favorite piece in the show is one of the two that used Goldes’ electrical current technique. In “From Sky to Earth” (2024), Goldes paints a landscape that is ripped right through the paper with a burned out chasm. This portal could go anywhere- perhaps to some hellish place, or maybe an alternate reality that doesn’t look quite so stark. I’d like to go there if I could.

“Dearest Earth, Darkest Sky” runs through March 1 at Dreamsong Gallery, 1237 4th St. NE, Mpls. Regular hours are Wed.-Sat., 12-5 p.m. (free). More information here.

Sheila Regan

Sheila Regan is a Twin Cities-based arts journalist. She writes MinnPost’s twice-weekly Artscape column. She can be reached at [email protected].

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