I Am My Family
March 6 – 30, 2008
ARTIST STATEMENT
I Am My Family is an autobiographical book and exhibition that features digitally altered self-portrait photographs. These self-portraits represent detailed performances of familial figures that can be thought of as acts of mourning and remembrance. I Am My Family proposes a language of mourning in which we search for those lost through resemblance and through the language of the portrait photograph. In reenacting ancestors through the conventions of the portrait photograph, the self-portraits in I Am My Family suggest that we look at old family photographs in order to connect with those that came before and to recognize ourselves in the photographic trace left by them.It also suggests that reconstructing a fractured familial and cultural history overshadowed by the Holocaust involves a process of gathering and connecting scattered fragments while at the same time accepting that this effort will yield incomplete results.
Origins of the Project
I Am My Family is the product of a process that started when my son was born. I slowly realized that my role as parent included the responsibility to pass on to my son a familial and cultural inheritance, and that such inheritance would need to be gathered and delivered gradually in a manner appropriate to his age.My attempts at historical story-telling, cultural and familial, public and private, made me acutely aware of how much I knew of the former, and how little of the latter. I thought of the many erasures that family history is subject to, and of the way in which my South American and Jewish educations privileged public histories. As I reached my middle years it became important to not only retrieve basic historical facts such as family names, dates, and genealogical relations, but also to reach towards the world of my ancestors as a basic foundation of an identity that I could pass on to my son. While I could access the considerable existing stores of knowledge of Eastern European Jewish life, knowledge of the pre-Holocaust lives of my grandparents and of their families only exists in fragments deeply buried within the memories of elderly relatives.
Artistic Exploration
I Am My Family explores relations amongst family portraiture, mourning and remembrance, history, and memory. These self-portraits articulate a process of identity representation through which ancestral figures become visible through my performance while at the same time remaining concealed behind my features and behind the conventions of the portrait photograph. These images are the result of a reconstructive process that acknowledges its own limitations in that the construction of an image of the past unavoidably involves a mixture of fragmented memory, artistic interpretation, and the inherent elusiveness of history.
Rafael Goldchain is a Jewish Latin-American Canadian Toronto-based photographer with an impressive educational background and extensive professional experience. His academic achievements include a Master of Arts in Art History from the University of Toronto (2017), a Master of Fine Arts from York University (2000), and a Bachelor of Applied Arts from Toronto Metropolitan University (1980).
Goldchain’s work has been featured in several notable publications, including “The Extended Moment” by Ann Thomas and John McElhone (National Gallery of Canada, 2018), “Photography in Canada 1960-2000” by Andrea Kunard (National Gallery of Canada, 2017), “Face: The New Photographic Portrait” by William Ewing (Thames and Hudson, 2007), and “Canadian Art in the Twentieth Century” by Joan Murray (Dundurn Press, 1999). Additionally, his work is the subject of two book monographs: “Nostalgia for an Unknown Land” (Lumiere Press, 1989) and “I Am My Family” (Princeton Architectural Press 2008). A film titled “Beautifully Broken: The Life and Times of Rafael Goldchain” (Willing Mind Productions, 2013) was also made about his work.
Goldchain’s photographs have been exhibited widely across Canada, the United States, Chile, Cuba, Germany, France, Italy, the Czech Republic, and México. His work is included in prestigious public and private collections, such as the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Goldchain retired from teaching in the Honours Bachelor of Photography program at Sheridan College in Oakville in 2023, concluding a significant chapter in his career as an educator. Let me know if you need any further adjustments!