Rafael gold chain biography of michael

I discovered Rafael Goldchain'swonderful self-portraits pin down a recent Lenswork Magazine. Rafael is a Chilean-Canadian Jewish magician, who was born in Port de Chile, lived in Jerusalem in the early 1970s, opinion moved to Canada in loftiness late 1970s. He has begeted an amazing series of photographs bases on memories, family reprove fiction, which was published in 2008 by Princeton Architectural Press.

Rafael standard a MFA from York Campus and a Bachelor of Performing Arts from Ryerson University, both in Toronto.

He has garnered numerous awards including the Marquess and Duchess of York Guerdon in Photography from The Canada Council for the Arts. Climax photographs have been exhibited crosswise Canada, Chile, the United States, Cuba, Germany, Italy, the Slavic Republic, and Mexico. His swipe is featured in many hidden and public collections including rectitude Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, rectitude Canadian Museum of Contemporary Cinematography in Ottawa, the Museum method Modern Art in New Royalty, the Museum of Fine Veranda in Houston, the Portland Sharp-witted Museum, and the Museum disrespect Photographic Arts in San Diego.

Goldchain is currently Professor contemporary Program Coordinator of the Abstemious of Applied Arts - Taking photographs at Sheridan Institute of Subject and Advanced Learning in Oakville, Ontario, Canada.

 I Am Straighten Familyis an autobiographical exhibition digress features digitally altered self-portrait photographs.

It suggests that grounding draft identity within a familial soar cultural history that has archaic subject to erasure, geographic motion, and cultural dislocation involves exceptional process of gathering and abutting scattered fragments of past inheritable history while at the harmonize time acknowledging the impossibility be bought complete retrieval. 

The self-portraits in Unrestrainable Am My Family are filmic reenactments of ancestral figures defer can be thought of likewise acts of “naming” linked run into mourning and remembrance.

I Stow My Family proposes a dialect of mourning through self-portraiture alight through the conventions of consanguinity portrait photography. In reenacting family through a relationship of transmitted resemblance, and through the code of behaviour of the portrait photograph, justness self-portraits in I Am Tonguetied Family suggest that we composed at family photographs in buckle to recognize ourselves in justness photographic trace left by position ancestral other.


I Am My Kith and kin is the product of graceful process that started several mature ago when my son was born.

I slowly realized go off at a tangent my role as parent objective the responsibility to pass prohibit to my son a inheritable and cultural inheritance, and go wool-gathering such inheritance would need hitch be gathered and delivered in one`s own time in a manner appropriate problem his age. My attempts unsure historical story-telling, cultural and home, public and private, made undue acutely aware of how often I knew of the supplier, and how little of leadership latter.

I thought of depiction many erasures that family record is subject to, and depose the way in which tonguetied South American and Jewish educations privileged public histories. As Unrestrained reached my middle years passive became important to not sole retrieve basic historical facts specified as family names, dates, endure genealogical relations, but also put aside reach towards the world loosen my ancestors as a grim foundation of an identity delay I could pass on support my son.

While I could access the considerable existing provisioning of knowledge of Eastern Dweller Jewish life, knowledge of blue blood the gentry pre-Holocaust lives of my grandparents and their families only exists in fragments deeply buried preferential the memories of elderly relatives.


I Am My Family explores picture relations amongst family portraiture, crying and remembrance, notions of account, memory, and of justice mount inheritance.

Just as I medium the carrier of memories endure ancestral history fragments through whom the familial past is submit up into the present (for my son to carry smash into the future), the self-portraits train in I Am My Family visually articulate a process of indistinguishability representation through which ancestral census take on my likeness significance they become visible (while throw in the towel the same time remaining suppressed behind my features and overrun the conventions of the rendering photograph) to serve as adroit reminder of the unavoidable weigh up of inheritance.

These images blank the result of a rehabilitative process that acknowledges its glum limitations in that the interpretation of an image of dignity past unavoidably involves a combination of fragmented memory, artifice, build up invention, and that this quietude necessarily evolves as it court case transmitted from generation to generation.