petter alexander goldstine is my art name.

In real life I go by petter.
I keep the name in lower case for legal reasons.

I started by discovering life on the edges of society. With my camera, I lived among homeless Americans, Roma Gypsies, Palestinians and Israelis, Kurds, Bangladeshi illegal immigrants and guerrilla soldiers; the outcasts of our society. Through the humanity I discovered while photographing, my exploration began to move inward, into the self. My work is about social awareness in a world desensitized by imagery. Often site specific, my social sculptures stem from a desire for interpersonal meetings in an attempt to make the viewer an essential physical part of what is going on, allowing interpretation to come from outside the event, ultimately confronting them with their own humanity.

A book on eco-philosophy, The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abrams, caused me to begin questioning what it means to be a human in our society faced with a growing distance from our past; namely rituals, nature and rights of passage. Thus I have slowly begun to immerse myself into this fabric between the human and more-than-human environment through several experiences/performances inspired by theories of phenomenology. My role is to experience life unhindered by social norms, then share these experiences to provide understanding and inspiration.

Often, I seek methods which will set forth a thought process; a period of exploration without any concrete plans about the outcome. In these works I allow the process to speak freely, seeking something divorced from intellect.

These days, I'm interested in sustainable arts in respect to the individual and society. My endeavor is to explore the possibilities a sustainable practice generates in the contemporary art scene. Usually, I work with what interests me at the time, right now it happens to be systems design, Permaculture, activism, mysticism, food politics, atypical rhythmic structures, and journalism. I've been inspired by the likes of Walker Evans, R.Buckminster Fuller, Bill Mollison, June of 44, guerrilla gardeners, Richard Schechner, David Abrams and my parents.

As far as this site goes; it's brand new. Everything in the categories are listed chronologically, the newest being at the top. This site is still changing as of 26.12.2009

petter
xxoo