Shelly Silver

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.

This article is about an artist and professor. For the politician, see Sheldon Silver.
Shelly Silver
Born1957
Brooklyn, New York
EducationCornell University
OccupationArtist, professor
Websitehttp://shellysilver.com

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]

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.[10]

A Strange New Beauty (2017)

A disturbing intrusion into the luxurious homes of Silicon Valley. Using an aggressive soundtrack and a full frame often fractured into small rectangles covered by text, Silver reveals a deafening violence behind the glittering beauty and deceptively calm of this suburban landscape. There is no human presence, but the homes seem to contain a memory of disturbing events, to bear the traces of a savagery just offscreen.[11]

The Lamps (2015)

The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven né Plotz, was an unsung member of the Dada Movement. A poet, artist, runaway, and all around public provocateur, she actively did not fit into her historical moment, and like most misfits, suffered for it. Some researchers believe that the Baroness was the artist behind Fountain, the ready-made urinal attributed to Marcel Duchamp.[12]

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)[13]

Turn (2018)

In 1959, Jean Seberg stares into Raoul Coutard’s 35mm camera lens and then turns – the closing frame of Godard’s Breathless is the back of her head. For the film it is a closing. For her character it is less clear. Is it a refusal? A denial? A shying away from? An admission of guilt or not caring? A disappearing act? In 2017 on the streets of Berlin, twenty-three women, friends and passersby, reverse Seberg’s action.[14]

This Film (2018)

Filming is alchemy; preserving, seeing, devouring, cutting. Chopping the flow of images with a push of a button. It privileges a solitary unseen protagonist, choosing this over that and then that, it eats anything, not everything,

The world hacked into fragments, jumps, frames. Kidnapped buildings gestures people animals happening now, again now, again now. The displacement of what was once to what is now seen carries the odor of end, regardless of the incessant movement of one frame to the next, a machine forcing the celluloid frames forced to run, jump, trip, turning it all into a sad slapstick -- slapstick also embodies heartbreak.[15]

Score for Joanna Kotze (2019)

An imaginary room resembling a swimming pool. An actual body of water. Sea creatures carried by the wind. Plastic. A dance film that leaves us primarily in the dark. A dance score for the choreographer Joanna Kotze.[16]

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

In a faceless apartment in Tatekawa, Tokyo, an American woman hires a Japanese woman to translate interviews about Japan’s declining birthrate. The American woman is presumptuous in her knowledge of Japan; the Japanese woman suffers from a self-professed excess of critical distance. They grate, fight, and crash together in love or lust, at which point their story gets hijacked into science fiction territory, as the translator interrupts their work sessions with stories from a world infected with the knowledge of its own demise. This neighborhood has already known devastation, having been wiped out the night of March 9th, 1945, by American bombs.

The third protagonist is the Tatekawa itself, the canal covered by an elevated highway that runs past the translator’s apartment, which gives the neighborhood its name. Reflecting back the concrete world in distorted patterns of blue, green or glittering black, the Tatekawa transports a shifting procession of birds, shoes, condoms, crabs, plastic bags, flowers, big fish, little fish, death, life.[17]

Girls/Museum (2020)

Girls | Museum is a voyage through the historical art collection of the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig/MdbK, guided by the expertise and insights of a group of girls, ages 7 to 19. Moving from painting to painting, century to century, they tell us what they see.[18]


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.[19]

Complete 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.
2015 The Lamps 4min.
2017 A Strange New Beauty 51min. 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.

References
  1. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2014-02-03. Retrieved 2014-02-01.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  2. <"Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2010-11-22. Retrieved 2014-02-05.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)>
  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://www.faz.net/asv/blinkvideo/portrait-in-the-neighboring-rooms-shelly-silver-and-fantasy-verite-12639310-p2.html>
  11. <https://www.moderntimes.review/kitchen-sink-high-conceptualism/>
  12. <https://www.berlinale.de/en/archive/jahresarchive/2016/02_programm_2016/02_filmdatenblatt_2016_201614009.html#tab=filmStills/>
  13. <http://www.film-documentaire.fr/4DACTION/w_fiche_film/44834_1/>
  14. <https://mubi.com/films/turn-2018/>
  15. <http://www.art-action.org/site/en/cat/rech/pays_annee/_cat_pays_annee_film.php?type=FILM&pays=USA&annee=2018&motcle=Search+by+keyword/>
  16. <https://mubi.com/films/score-for-joanna-kotze>
  17. <https://asianmoviepulse.com/2019/06/documentary-review-a-tiny-place-that-is-hard-to-touch-2019-by-shelly-silver/>
  18. <https://www.screendaily.com/reviews/girls/museum-dok-leipzig-review/5154186.article>
  19. <http://www.imaionline-katalog.de/servlet/return/Silver-Shelly_Bio_GB.pdf?oid=53806&contenttype=application/pdf>
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