One of the artists set to exhibit in Brought To You By is Suzanne Silver. Suzanne Silver is an assistant professor in the Painting & Drawing program of the Department of Art. Silver studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris and received a BA from Smith College and an M.F.A. at The Ohio State University. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including the Axel Raben Gallery in NYC, Nexus Contemporary Art Center in Atlanta, CJM in San Francisco, Michlelet David Yellin in Jerusalem, the Castle of Otranto in Otranto, Italy, the Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati, and The Bureau for Open Culture in Columbus. She has received an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council and grants in mixed media from the Greater Columbus Arts Council and drawing from the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Silver advocates an expansive approach to the medium of drawing and combines unexpected materials such as powders, balloons, gold leaf, thread, paints, soap, and slate to create a visual language that is open to multiple readings.
Matt Morris, one of our collective members who is both art critic and artist in his own right, reviewed an exhibition of Suzanne Silver's work at the Weston Gallery last summer. It was this review, in fact, that has everything to do with his gratefulness towards Silver, as he explained to the rest of us in an early planning meeting. The text can be read below.
SUZANNE SILVER
CINCINNATI
In Seeing the Fugitive, Suzanne Silver enlists a mysterious vocabulary of powder, white neon, clear vinyl, and art studio detritus. Her installation is as abstractly expressive as it is semantically experimental in its anxious response to today’s unpredictable climate. In a room filled with text-based works, Silver manages to emphasize the heterotopic dimension of the gallery space, and to direct our attention to the minefield between image and written language. She liberates the pictorial possibilities of concrete verse, much as Stéphane Mallarmé did with dispersed words across white pages. In this, Silver expresses her disinterest in and mistrust of words’ and text’s typical orderliness, that is, their compliance to the page. Appropriating snippets of text about war and terrorism, she permutes them in two and three dimensions, as if she could parse through the possible motives and meanings behind the propaganda and its codes. She also slips small Jenny Holzer-like observations such as “white lies/ black truths” into the
exhibition.
Silver’ aim is a critique of the “sinister” inconsistencies of the present political landscape and its war on abstract adversaries. In the installation, winding paths, sculptural decoys resembling bombs, and gestural graphite and neon scribbles proliferate, creating an alternate universe where irrationality, double meanings, and ambiguities of fact and substance yield unassuming visual significance rather than political certitudes. What’s more, she dissimulates the disquiet of her politics under the guise of abstract expressionist afterbirth. The animated puddles of Pollock and the clamoring abstractions of Kline lie still on the gallery floor, beneath drifts of dust and powder. Silver’s use of powder raises issues of stillness, dematerialization, and an anxiety over loss. Her snowy floor improvisations are echoed in murmurs from faint wall drawings, décollaged with remains of evanescent debris. Roland Barthes once wrote on silence, noting, “What is expressly produced so as not to be a sign is very quickly recuperated as a sign. Silence itself takes on the form of an image.” Silver literalizes this assertion and more: the exhibition requires a certain suspension of prescribed judgments, demanding of both the artist and ourselves a definite implication—in
contrast to a federal government that notoriously speaks too quickly, overstepping the bounds of fact into baseless accusation.
Facing a pulsating white neon signs that reads “Drawing a Blank,” one expansive wall has been left nearly blank. Here, the marks are ethereal, as if Silver were drawing in tongues. Spirituality emerges through Zen whiteness,
establishing a contrast to the problems of diction and policy tackled elsewhere in the exhibition.
Bulging milky-white and greasy-brown discs edged with the various silvers of aluminum foil and metal leaf occasionally interrupt the pervasive whiteness of Silver’s work. These piles of shaped paintings are bodily and scatological. Fecal metaphors spill into the space of Silver’s anxieties, yielding a quite reckoning: what’s being discussed is bullshit, politicians flinging shit, and most of all the shit is hitting the fan. Jewish orthodoxy offers a blessing meant to be uttered after defecation—the asher yatzar—which encapsulates this dimension of primal
painting: “Blessed are You Hashem… [who] created within man many openings and many cavities… who heals all flesh and acts wonderously.”
Thus, conflating the sacred and the profane, the soupy excess that punctuates the exhibition’ sparseness brings the body sharply into focus. Concerned with much more than the present war, it foregrounds invisibility and the humanity. Through inchoate fragments of critical play, political fervor, and spirituality, Seeing the Fugitives’ post-fallout inquiry collapses the safety of internal reverie around the viewer’s feet.
—Matthew Morris
No comments:
Post a Comment