Maximilian Goldfarb: Numbers Station
09.22.2023 – 12.16.2023
Opening Reception Friday, September 22, 7–10pm
The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art is pleased to announce Numbers Station, an exhibition by Maximilian Goldfarb. Numbers Station expands on Goldfarb’s ongoing project of ten years, Remote Viewing: 500 Tableaux, for which he has been creating a vast archive of sculptures based on text descriptions of found photos.
Reported throughout the past century “numbers stations” are shortwave radio stations which broadcast chains of numbers, believed to be encryptions intended for intelligence officers in the field. Working at these blurry boundaries between transmission/degradation, signal/noise, and fact/fiction, Goldfarb’s project reveals the shaky foundations of knowledge production as a constant play between understanding and misunderstanding, path dependency, and new possibility.
Numbers Station re-positions and re-codes what may be understood about familiar images and forms, their potential readings, meanings, and purpose. The works evoke archaeological ruins, exploring the relationship between an object and its model, the differences between authentic form and its replicated double. The ecology of things presented in Numbers Station are activated as operational language: sculptural facsimiles, substitutions, metonyms, approximations or alternates which create disturbances in transmission.
Numbers Station includes newly created sculptures, images, and ephemera, as well as Negative—an aerial video and soundscape that conveys an imagined reconstruction of the present moment. Also included is a book-object designed by Ilona Gaynor which examines the work as a system for the close observation and potential reading of artifacts, while also straining the abilities to index unbounded cultural materials.
Maximilian Goldfarb received his BFA from Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY. He completed his MS in Visual Studies in 2006 at MIT. Goldfarb is a maker of unsettled objects and soundscapes. Forms of production include books, sculptural installations, site-based artworks, experimental architectures, and radio programming. His work often includes publication formats as a way of incorporating drawings and visual research processes as a distributive aspect of works.
Goldfarb has completed object, text, and media works with support from the Harpo Foundation, the Elizabeth Graham Foundation, NYSCA, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The Kaplan Institute, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Experimental Television Center. He has participated in numerous exhibitions in venues including, Sculpture Center, NY; Stadsgalerij, NL; Western Front, BC; White Columns, NY and The Drawing Center, NY. A recent fellow at MacDowell, several of his publications can be found at Printed Matter and Art Metropole. Goldfarb is co-author of Architectural Inventions (Laurence King Publishing), an archive of contemporary visionary architectural drawings. He is a collaborator of the Incident Report exhibition platform in Hudson, NY.
The book, “Numbers Station” was published by PS Studio. Goldfarb produced “Negative” as a recent research fellow at the UB Humanities Institute.
