Susan Silas “Love in the ruins; sex over 50”
Studio 10
This event has ended.
TO SELVES; Joy Episalla and Susan Silas opens at momenta art the same evening, through April 13th. A book titled TO SELVES; Joy Episalla and Susan Silas will accompany this exhibition and momenta art will host a panel discussion and book launch on Sunday, March 16 at 3 p.m. Panelists will include: artist Judith Braun, Brooklyn-based transmedia artist Carla Gannis, curator Risa Puleo and photographer Marcia Salo. momenta art is also located at 56 Bogart Street.
Ms. Silas has described love in the ruins as “a personal diary of sex and sensuality; resilience and the decay of the aging body.” Begun in 2003, the work is an ongoing document of subtle changes and approaching mortality. It is also a record of self-examination, and in this regard its terrain overlaps with the self-portrait sessions on view at momenta art. Ms. Silas has used photographic images, video, and occasional writing to explore the collision of personal experience with over-determining historical events, with special attention to the Shoah in Europe. Simultaneously, she has focused her camera on the processes of decay and transformation in an over decade-long project photographing found birds. In her two current bodies of work, she turns the camera on the self, peering closely at intimacy in the one instance and self-intimacy in the other.
Helmbrechts walk, 1998-2003, her large scale project retracing the steps of a death march of all women prisoners at the close of World War II, has been exhibited at The Koffler Gallery, Toronto, 2005, Hebrew Union College Museum, New York City, 2009-2010; Kunstverien Grafschaft Bentheim in Neuenhaus, Germany, 2010; Kunsthalle Exnergasse_WUK in Vienna, 2010; and the Center for Contemporary Arts, Celje, Slovenia, 2011. Helmbrechts walk, 1998-2003, is the subject of a chapter in Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory by Brett Ashley Kaplan, published by Routledge in 2011 and in Dora Apel’s, Memory Affects; The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing and is cited in Unwanted Beauty; Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representation, also by Brett Ashley Kaplan.
RAVEN, a work from the series found birds, was exhibited at CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles in September, 2013. Ms. Silas’s work has been featured in Anti-Utopias, Camera Austria, Fotómúvészet and Artnet Magazine and reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, the Village Voice, and the New Yorker. Her occasional essays have been published in the New York Times, Exquisite Corpse, thirteen.org REEL 13, Frog, and Podium (the online literary magazine of the 92nd Street Y). She is a regular contributor to the online art magazine Hyperallergic and co-editor of the artblog MOMMY. Ms. Silas has been interviewed by the BBC and by ArtonAir.org. She has been awarded residential fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, The Corporation of Yaddo, VCCA, Ucross Foundation, New Space Arts Foundation in Vietnam and the National Parks Service at Everglades National Park. Ms. Silas received her BA in History at Reed College in Portland, Oregon and her MFA in Fine Art at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California.
Media
Schedule
from March 07, 2014 to April 06, 2014
Opening Reception on 2014-03-07 from 19:00 to 21:00