Sapphire Goss is an artist who works with moving image, photography and other lens-based methods. She explores the fragility of time, place, and perception through analogue film, sound, and material experimentation, creating chimerical imagery to make an ‘analogue uncanny’ where light, time and chemicals come together in unexpected ways; grainy, shimmering, otherworldly, moving and mysterious. Using obsolete processes and materials: analogue film, antique glass, paper, liquid lenses, organic materials, inputs from public contributors, multiple channels that feedback in endless combinations or sound/data responsive elements - she creates work that grows, lives and decays beyond the screen. Working with expired film, cameraless techniques, and experimental sound, she creates unstable, shifting landscapes where the physical and spectral intertwine. Her work engages with spaces between presence and absence, signal and noise, material and memory, inviting the viewer into fleeting, dissolving worlds where light and sound create unstable realities. Goss' work has been shown widely in exhibitions and events including the Barbican, ArtScience Singapore, Tate Exchange, By Art Matters Hangzhou, Fermynwoods Contemporary, Brighton Museums, Milton Keynes Art Centre, Denver Clock Tower and Maysles Centre New York. She has received multiple commissions and awards.
“Each video is a reinvention of cinema and a reminder of the magic inherent in the medium. Often working with analogue or even expired film and using homemade lenses to feature the repetitive textures of water, light, erosion, and other ecological materials and processes, Goss manages to create video art that is both wholly new and utterly infused with material history.”
Darran Anderson in the Yale Review, winter 2023 issue
"The works explore the stagnation of time and the dissociation between memory and illusion, but also form a collision between distance and rhythm, constructing a drifting and blurred dream, guiding us to shuttle between the tangible and intangible, time and space."
Exhibition notes: To the Past, to the Future, By Art Matters Hangzhou
