Eva Goetz
Cove Street Arts • Portland, ME • covestreetarts.com • Through February 22, 2020
In a self-reflective piece published in the Union of Maine Visual Artists’ online Maine Arts Quarterly last year, Portland-based artist Eva Goetz described her transition from making paintings that evoked some of the horrors and tragedies of the world—the kidnapping of girls by Boko Haram in Nigeria, the murder of churchgoers in Charleston—to a series called Animals with Teeth. The new series bore witness and acknowledged “upheaval, chaos and war in a new context” that Goetz hoped might help change the world. “I was baring my teeth against injustice and celebrating joy at the same time,” she wrote.
For her show at Cove Street Arts, Goetz has again pivoted in her focus, to robots and “our love affair with technology.” Her multi-media installation features a group of large animated 3-D panel “bot” paintings created with help from a tech team. The team, which included students from the Baxter Academy for Technology and Science and the University of Maine Robotics Club, used Arduino software, Raspberry Pi technologies and stepper motors to set the images in motion.
The colorful painted robots with their moveable parts signal to viewers using semaphore, Morse code, sign language and split-flap display to convey simple messages: “Help,” “Stop,” “Look,” “Listen.” In Goetz’s clever formulation, the robots “beckon and ask us to ‘Think-A-Bot-It.’”
The robots are decorative and geometric, featuring polka dots and squares, their arms irregular shapes. Some of them recall African masks, their features simple and stylized. They are engaging presences.
The show also includes 56 acrylic gouache paintings, each of them 6 x 8 inches, with titles such as AI, Algorithm and Analyze, accompanied by a text defining the term and offering “BOT MUSINGS,” reflections on how these concepts and processes define our lives. Boxes of 49 of the brightly colored robot images are available as Tarot-like “Bot cards” for divining the future.
In a statement for the show, Goetz considers the future of artificial intelligence, wondering if its impact will be positive or negative. “Whose feet do we worship at? Is technology the new God?” she asks, adding, “Who survives our creations?” Her robots help us move toward answers.