Shelly Silver

Last updated
Shelly Silver
Born1957
Education Cornell University
Occupation(s)Artist, professor
Website http://shellysilver.com

Shelly Silver (born 1957 in Brooklyn, NY) is an American artist who works with film, video, and photography. Her art has been exhibited and broadcast throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia. She is Associate Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University School of the Arts.

Contents

Biography

Silver attended Cornell University, graduating in 1980 with a B.A. in Intellectual History, and a B.F.A. in Mixed Media and subsequently attended the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Studio Program. [1] She has worked as a commercial video editor. In the 1990s, she lived in Germany, France, and Japan.

Silver has taught video art at the German Film and Television Academy, the New York University Tisch School of the Arts, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and presently at Columbia University. She has received awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, NYSCA, NYFA, the DAAD, the Jerome Foundation, the Japan Foundation and Anonymous was a Woman. She currently lives in New York City. [2]

Art

Silver uses a mixture of fiction, documentary, and experimental genres to investigate questions of cultural identity. She experiments with perspective, exploring the power dynamics that exist between filmmakers and their subjects. Her role as a traveler and an outsider inspired the works she made abroad, such as Former East/Former West (1994) and 37 Stories About Leaving Home (1996). Her recent work centers on New York’s Chinatown. [3]

Meet the People (1986)

The film consists of testimonials from fourteen individuals representing average New Yorkers talking about their daily lives. The film mimics the documentary genre, but at the end of the film, the credits reveal that all fourteen subjects are actors reading from a script written by Silver. [4]

Former East/Former West (1994)

Consisting of hundreds of street interviews done in Berlin two years after the Reunification, this documentary is a portrait of citizen attitudes about what it means to be German at that particular moment in history. [5]

37 Stories About Leaving Home (1996)

Silver blends interviews with Japanese women describing their lives with a folktale of a young woman who is stolen by an Oni who is later saved by her mother. [6]

small lies, Big Truth (1999)

In this work Silver pairs audio of narrators (four couples) reading the testimonials of Monica Lewinsky and President Bill Clinton as published in the Starr Report with found footage of zoo animals. [7]

suicide (2003)

This feature-length fictional film follows a filmmaker through malls, airports, and train stations in Central America, Asia, and Europe as she searches for a reason to live. The role of the filmmaker is played by Silver herself. [8]

What I’m Looking For (2004)

A series of photographs representing the results of a request posted to an online dating service: “I'm looking for people who would like to be photographed in public revealing something of themselves...” [9]

in complete world (2008)

“Deceptively simple in its formal rigor, the film focuses on timbres of voices and shapes of faces, investing without reservation in the extended, non-sound-bite take in which all the strangeness, pathos, tang and perspicacity of demonic speech unfolds. Spliced between the interviews, black screens backed by city sounds both link and separate the speakers; the city is a matrix, but all will be drowned out if we don’t listen carefully.” -Haim Steinbach [10]

TOUCH (2013)

Silver constructs the fictional story of a gay man who has returned to New York after fifty years to care for his dying mother. The narration of the film is an essay told from the man’s point of a view, an amalgam of research and interviews. [11]

A Strange New Beauty (2017)

The Lamps (2015)

Frog Spider Hand Horse House (2013-2017)

Details of human bodies and animals in a peri-urban environment - dancing and motionless, alive and dead. Like her ambivalent plans, as beautiful as they are sharp, the visual poem composed by Shelly Silver shows the fragility of beings in the very expression of their vitality, the pulse and the possibility of its cessation. (Charlotte Garson) [12]

Turn (2018)

This Film (2018)

Score for Joanna Kotze (2019)

a tiny place that is hard to touch 触れがたき小さな場所 (2019)

Girls/Museum (2020)

“At once a social inquiry, a critical essay in art history and a poised, even sculptural study of people, paintings and space, Girls/Museum is thought-provoking, engaging and visually striking” -Jonathan Romney [13]

“As a watcher, you are involved and encouraged to think or think along without the documentation having an instructive effect. This is also achieved with the help of the permanent change of intersection between proximity and distance, i.e. overall image and detail of the image. Silver thus offers the opportunity to view the individual works of art again from an almost intimate proximity.” -Wiebke Drescher [14]

“The fact that such young women recognize their own captivity or their desires of carefreeness in the pictures deepens the character of each individual narrator with every minute. You learn about their fears and dreams. More than just snapshots of large masterpieces are created, because they form snapshots of a young generation and you get to know them briefly but intensively.” -Johanna Klima [15]

Exhibitions

Silver’s art has been exhibited in venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Yokohama Museum of Art, the Pompidou Centre, the Kyoto National Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Museo Reina Sofia, and the London, Singapore, New York, Moscow, and Berlin film festivals. Her work has been broadcast on BBC/England, PBS/USA, Arte, Planete/Europe, RTÉ/Ireland, SWR/Germany, and Atenor/Spain. [16]

Filmography

YearTitleLength
1986Meet the People16min.
1989Things I Forget to Tell Myself2min.
1990We4min.
1989getting in.3min.
1991The Houses That Are Left52min.
1994April 210min.
1994FragmentsVarious
1994Former East/Former West62min.
199637 Stories About Leaving Home52min.
1999small lies, Big Truth19min.
2003170min.
2003suicide70min.
2004What I'm Looking For15min.
2008in complete world53min.
20095 Lessons and 9 Questions About Chinatown10min.
2013TOUCH68min.
2015The Lamps4min.
2017A Strange New Beauty51min.2017Frog Spider Hand Horse House50min.
2018Turn4min.
2018This Film7min.
2019a tiny place that is hard to touch 触れがたき小さな場所39min.
2019Score for Joanna Kotze4min.
2020Girls/Museum71min.

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Barbara Sykes into a family of artists, designers and inventors. Since childhood, she has produced work in a variety of different art forms. In 1974, she became one of Chicago's pioneering video and new media artists and, later to include, independent video producer, exhibition curator and teacher. Sykes is a Chicago based experimental video artist who explores themes of spirituality, ritual and indigeneity from a feminist perspective. Sykes is known for her pioneering experimentation with computer graphics in her video work, utilizing the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois, Chicago, at a time when this technology was just emerging. Her early works broke new grounds in Chicago's emerging New Media Art scene, and continue to inspire women to explore experimental realms. With a passion for community, she fostered significant collaborations with many institutions that include but are not limited to University of Illinois, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College, Center for New Television, and (art)n laboratory. These collaborations became exemplary for the showcasing of new media work. The wave of video, new media and computer art that she pioneered alongside many other seminal early Chicago New Media artists persists as a major influence for artists and educators today. Her work has been exhibited internationally, at institutions such as Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (Copenhagen), Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Metropolitan Museum of Art , Museum of the Art Institute (Chicago), The Metropolitan Museum of Art and SIGGRAPH. Sykes's tapes have been broadcast in Sweden, Italy, Puerto Rico and extensively throughout in the US, including "The Independents", PBS national broadcast, 1985, and national cablecast, 1984. Media Burn has an online selection of her tapes and over 200 of her raw footage, master edits, dubs and compilation tapes in their Independent Video Archives @ Barbara Sykes https://mediaburn.org/collections/videomakers-page/barbara-sykes/. Select grants include a National Endowment for the Arts and American Film Institute Regional Fellowship, Evanston Art Council Cultural Arts Fund and several Illinois Arts Council grants. In 2017, Sykes began to paint. In 2020, as the recipient of an Evanston Art Center Individual Artist Exhibition Award, Ethereal Abstractions, Sykes's first solo watercolor exhibition premiered 81paintings and she gave an online Artist Talk. Her paintings are lyrical, colorful abstractions reminiscent of organic shapes, ethereal forms and underwater landscapes - evocative impressions of spiritual and elemental worlds. They evoke the spontaneity and themes that have evolved from her previous body of time-based and digital artwork. In 2021, she moved to Florida. Her 2022 painting exhibitions/reviews include Forces of Nature showcased on the cover of Estero Life Magazine and she is in the article, Beholding Beauty: Artists of Estero Exhibit at COCO Art Gallery, the Florida Watercolor Society's 2022 Online Show, the 36th Annual All Florida Exhibition and Connections Art in Flight exhibit at the Southwest Florida International Airport, June 2022 to June 2023. She paints under the name of Barbara L. Sykes.

References

  1. "Shelly Silver >> video artist & filmmaker". Archived from the original on 2014-02-03. Retrieved 2014-02-01.
  2. "Shelly Silver | Columbia University School of the Arts". Archived from the original on 2010-11-22. Retrieved 2014-02-05.>
  3. http://www.eai.org/artistTitles.htm?id=256>
  4. Sarrazin, Stephen. Shelly Silver: Video. Museum for Art & History, 2001, p. 30-35.
  5. <Wilder, Charly. The Berlin Wall: How Today’s Art Reflects 20 Years of Memories. Esquire Magazine, August 19, 2009.>
  6. <Huber-Sigwart, Ann. Dialogue: Shelly Silver. n.paradoxa, International Feminist Art Journal, January 2002. Volume 9.>
  7. <Smith, Roberta. Art in Review. The New York Times, December 12, 1997.>
  8. <Scott, A.O. Video Artists Escape Hollywood Sensibility to Explore Their Inner Worlds. The New York Times, July 23rd, 2003>
  9. <Bellour, Raymond. The Time in Movement. Viva Fotofilm, 2010, p 207-212>
  10. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55fb7a98e4b0fa9f9a7f7a45/t/56628258e4b08333d1f0eb6a/1449296472253/artforum+steinbach+solo.tif.pdf>
  11. https://www.faz.net/asv/blinkvideo/portrait-in-the-neighboring-rooms-shelly-silver-and-fantasy-verite-12639310-p2.html>
  12. http://www.film-documentaire.fr/4DACTION/w_fiche_film/44834_1/>
  13. https://www.screendaily.com/reviews/girls/museum-dok-leipzig-review/5154186.article>
  14. https://radiomephisto.de/news/girlsmuseum-virtueller-museumsbesuch-68688>
  15. https://www.luhze.de/2020/10/30/ein-film-zum-schweigen/>
  16. http://www.imaionline-katalog.de/servlet/return/Silver-Shelly_Bio_GB.pdf?oid=53806&contenttype=application/pdf>