Hidden or Seeking
Hidden or Seeking by Brooke Erin Goldstein is a quilted painting series created in response to the first two plays in Trinity Repertory Company’s 2024-2025 season. Both plays, POTUS: or, Behind Every Great Dumbass are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive and Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson - APT. 2B, are centered around women’s voices and experiences. This inspired Goldstein to revisit quilted work she made from 2017-2018 about domesticity and reconstruct them into quilted painting compositions through the lens of each plays storyline.
With feminine sensibilities, Goldstein sews, cuts, tears, frays, paints and stains vintage bed sheets and other reclaimed fabrics to highlight the often overlooked labor and ingenuity of women in these quilted paintings and her greater body of work. Each of the three pieces in this series tackles concepts related to mystery and hidden truths. The large horizontal piece above the theater entrance is titled Campaign. It references how money and polarizing media coverage can hypnotize us influencing our beliefs in order to gain our vote. It was especially exciting for Goldstein to create this piece while following the media coverage of our current 2024 election cycle.
Each of the vertical pieces that flank the building’s main entryway in the lobby speak to the anxiety and exhilaration that we experience as a mystery unfolds. The piece to the left titled Accent into Suspicion visually leads us up a staircase into the darkness compositionally cutting us off just as we get to the top. This work is Goldstein's love letter to the curiosity and fear that fuels our human condition and resides in the heart of mystery lovers everywhere. The painting to the right titled Peering Through or Pouring Out finds the viewer looking into the window of a home where things seem activated for better or for worse. This plays on our voyeuristic nature as we justify to ourselves the desire to spy on others. This entire series allowed Goldstein to explore making something old into something new by flipping her perspective, just as each of these two plays take stories that are somewhat familiar to us and flips the audience’s perspective through the eyes of the women at the stage’s forefront.
*Hidden or Seeking was on display at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence RI from September 5th to November 17th 2024.
**All photos by Myself
