The Rise of Medusa
Goldie Poblador
with scents by M Dougherty and sound sculptures by Ben Richter
July 12 to August 2 2025 @ Olfactory Art Keller
25A Henry Street, New York 10002, NY
Opening Reception on Saturday July 12 from 3pm to 6pm
Why are you so angry?
They made Medusa a monster. Poseidon, Athena, Perseus. Raped, mutated, beheaded. Medusa was once an Athenian priestess. But after Poseidon assaults her in her place of work and worship, it is not the male god that is punished but the female mortal. Athena turns Medusa into a terrifying Gorgon with serpentine hair and a petrifying look. But all the monster does is return one’s gaze.
In The Rise of Medusa, Goldie Poblador constructs an immersive exhibition that mourns the Verde Island Passage’s irreparable ecological devastation, caused by 2023 oil spills. For this iteration at Olfactory Art Keller, Poblador creates new wall-bound sculptures based on rare manuscripts from the seventeenth to nineteenth-centuries that catalogue coral and sea dwelling invertebrates. The exhibition will be completely dark, with visitors invited to use flashlights that activate the bioluminescent sculptures and navigate through the space. With the additional sensorial elements of smell and sound, Poblador invites the viewer to the seafloor where they might trace the marine environment’s ecological stages as it recovers from the oil spill. With this reparative journey, Poblador finds a familiar trajectory of healing. She imagines Medusa as the monstrous feminine emerging from the wreckage – a symbol of female loss, rage, resilience, and prosperity. Artist and perfumer M Dougherty creates three scents – Oil Slick, Dead Coral, and Verde – that accompany three sound sculptures by sound artist and composer Ben Richter.
The Rise of Medusa is the third stage of Poblador’s Sea Anomaly series that began in 2023 and has been shown in New York, Singapore, and the Philippines. This body of work emerged from a residency at the Oakspring Garden Foundation, during which the artist encountered a rare book that paired botanic illustrations with hopeful poetry. This coupling relates the natural world to a sense of optimism that the artist also finds in her family histories: Poblador’s paternal grandfather was a folk poet who made similar connections with the earth. Poblador contemplates the passing of knowledge between physical and oral mediums as they coalesce in her delicate sculptures that are an extension of the work Poblador began at the Corning Museum of Glass. There Poblador studied the museum’s extensive collection of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka invertebrate specimens. The Blaschkas were a father and son duo of 19th century jewellers who developed a specific glass-blowing technique to catalogue organic specimens.
Poblador’s practice centres on female archetypes such as the maiden, but recently her focus has shifted to the monstrous feminine. In 2013, Poblador was punched in the face in a New York City subway as bystanders failed to help her. In the aftermath, the artist fell into what she describes as the ‘abyss’ and grappled with the monstrous side of her that might have always been there: crazy, angry, ugly. In The Monstrous Feminine, Barbara Creed argues that female monsters in film reflect societal fears about women. Medusa’s petrifying regard, then, is like a mirror of patriarchy’s own anxiety about itself. Building on Hélène Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Poblador envisions herself, Magwayen, and women as resilient and complex beings, laughing in the face of it all.
Text by Marv Recinto
Advised by
Andreas Keller
Erwin Romulo
Special thanks to
OSGF residency and library team
Apa Agbayani
Joseph Sousa
Napoleon and Gizela Poblador