“And so, as I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I am dreaming. Then I think: this is a dream, a pure diversion of my will; and now that I have unlimited power, I am going to cause a tiger.
Oh, incompetence! Never can my dreams engender the wild beast I long for. The tiger indeed appears, but stuffed or flimsy, or with impure variations of shape, or of an implausible size, or all too fleeting, or with a touch of the dog or the bird.”
-Jorge Luis Borges (from The Maker, A.K.A.: Dreamtigers)
Goody-B. Wiseman
b. 1973, Castine, Maine
Goody-B. Wiseman lives and works in the wilds of Down East Maine and also splits her time between Canada and Los Angeles. Wiseman works in a variety of media including sculpture, drawing, video and printed matter. Her practice is primarily engaged with the use and structure of narrative.
Inspired by nature and history and arcana, Wiseman’s more recent work explores the mythical figure of the “feral child.” Her latest bronze works are meditations on “in-betweenness.” These miniature sculptures, small enough to hold in the palm of your hand, are liminal figures that exist in between nature and culture, male and female, wild and tamed, beautiful and the grotesque. Often the work is imprinted with other recurring narratives and obsessions – revolution, power, the frustrated yearning to be one with nature, institutional power, museological presentation, literature and pulp fiction, curiosity cabinets, mythology, anthropology, ethnography, science, science fiction, rituals and revelries, and rock and roll.
Wiseman holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in San Francisco, California (2005) and a BFA Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada (2000). She has exhibited her work widely across North America and Europe. Solo and group exhibitions include a wide range of international venues such as MULHERIN + POLLARD (2013), The Orange Country Museum of Art (2010); Mandarin Gallery, Los Angeles; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2007); The New Brunswick Museum (2010); Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid (2008); the Pompidou Center, Paris (2007); and John Connelly Presents, New York (2005). Wiseman exhibits extensively in contemporary art and museum galleries in Eastern Canada and New England. Her work is part of public and private collections in Europe, Canada and the United States. Wiseman is represented by Maine Art Hill in Kennebunk, Maine; Mulherin New York / Toronto, Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects in Toronto; Cynthia Winings Gallery, Blue Hill, Maine; Gallery Page and Strange, Halifax, Nova Scotia; and Gallery B. in Castine, Maine.