Born in Santiago, Chile, Goldchain received a Master of Fine
Arts from York University and currently teaches photography
and digital art at Sheridan Institute of Technology. He is an
Adjunct Professor at York University’s Graduate Program in
Visual Arts.

Rafael Goldchain’s artwork has been shown across Canada,
as well as in the U.S., South America and Europe. His work is
in the collections of the Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, France,
the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, amongst private and public art collections.

Familial Ground is an autobiographical exhibition that features digitally altered self-portrait photographs. It suggests that grounding identity within a familial and cultural history subject to erasures, geographic displacements, and cultural dislocations entails a process of gathering and connecting scattered fragments of past familial history while acknowledging the impossibility of complete retrieval.

Familial Ground is the product of a process that started several years ago when my son was born. I gradually realized that my new 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 articulating histories, 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 my family history was subjected to, and of the way in which my South American and Jewish educations privileged public histories. 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 their families only exists in fragments deeply buried within the memories of elderly relatives. 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 attempt to know the world of my ancestors as a basic foundation of an identity that I could pass on to my son.

Visit: www.rafaelgoldchain.com