About
Over the past decade, Golden's work has focused on urban plants as a source of healing, joy, and a way of understanding the impact of climate change locally. Her work with plants began with a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation in 2006, when Golden started drawing and photographing a forest in Massachusetts before it was destroyed. Four years later, she received a Long-term Ecological Research Grant in the Arts from the National Science Foundation to study the different ways that artists and scientists depict ecological change at the Harvard Forest in Petersham, Massachusetts. Regan was also a Core Program Fellow in Critical Studies at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and continued her research into ecology in 2017 as an Artist-in-Residence at the College of Biological Sciences Conservatory at the University of Minnesota, which houses rare plants from around the world. In 2020, Golden received a Next Step Grant to photograph and draw endangered arctic plants growing along the cliffs of Lake Superior. She is currently completing an Artist Residency at The Lyndale Rose Garden in partnership with Minneapolis Parks and Kolman & Reeb Gallery.
Regan Golden is an Associate Professor at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design teaching Drawing & Painting, Intermedia and Critical Studies.
My photographs, drawings and collages record changing landscapes overtime and convey how I experience, imagine and remember these places. Over the past decade I have worked from four different sites: a forest in Massachusetts, the urban prairie in Minneapolis, the cliffs of Lake Superior, and the nation's second oldest Rose Garden.
I combine water-based drawing and painting media with high resolution scans and macro photography to depict plants in precise detail, then obscure these exacting pictures with heavy brushstrokes and fragments of cut paper. Collage is my primary medium because I can reconfigure the relationship between the parts and the whole in temporary assemblages staged for the camera or installed in a space. My images are constantly being cut apart and recycled into the next iteration in a cyclical process that reflects the changing landscapes I work within. Collage enables me to explore what holds all the parts of these increasingly fractured landscapes in tension.
&I am inspired by early forms of photography, like solargrams and chronophotography, where the lines between art and science, abstraction and description are less clear. I adapt these early photographic processes to digital photography by inviting into the controlled space of my studio the forces of light and darkness (reflectivity, translucency, brilliancy, absorption), entropy and decay (films, residue, accretions, dissolution, cuts) and moisture (wetness, drips, condensation, melting, steam, droplets, icing over). Chance is integral to my process, the unexpected is what makes me feel that I am collaborating with these natural forces. As an artist I produce and preserve the extraordinary in these very unique landscapes.%