BROOKLYN, NY.- STUDIO10 announces a solo exhibition of large scale photographs by New York artist Susan Silas entitled love in the ruins; sex over 50 opening on March 7th, 2014 from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m., through April 6th, 2014.
TO SELVES; Joy Episalla and Susan Silas opens at momenta art the same evening, through April 13th. A book will accompany the exhibition and momenta art will host a panel discussion and book launch on Sunday, March 16 at 3 p.m. 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; about the 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 these two recent 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 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 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. Ms. Silas has been interviewed by the BBC and by ArtonAir.org. In 2012, she launched MOMMY, an interview format blog and appreciation of mid-career women artists, together with artist Chrysanne Stathacos. 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.
