Apr
10
Our newest exhibition by artist Susan Silas opened last night at CB1 and will be up through May 15, 2011. Two very good writers have posted their thoughts about her work online. Both are worth reading (see links below).
eyes wide shut, 2010, from the series; found birds, 2000 - the present (image four of twenty-four)
Roger Denson has an in depth essay on Susan’s work over the past few years on The Huffington Post, Holocaust and Redemption in the Work of Susan Silas.
Of all animals, none preserve the beauty and dignity of death with a grandeur and longevity approaching that of the many species of birds. As any Audubon enthusiast could attest, the decomposition of birds, owing to the texture, refinery, and longevity of feathers, shields us from the harder facts of entropy, allows us to linger over the cessation of life at times to the very point of its disappearance. It is difficult to think of another class of animals so inclined to support human perceptual standards of beauty both in life and in death. Birds have long been the favorites of taxonomists for this reason. Just as Silas declined to assault us with historical images of Hungarian Jews corralled, emaciated, or piled up before gaping graves, she doesn’t present a demise between the moment of death and the final disappearance so terrible we must turn away from it. And yet decay imposes its bleakness even on the grace of birds. Sometimes it appears in the early stages, when we can still recognize the forms of the birds we so love to look at and listen to. At other times decay overpowers us at its final stages, graphically impressing on us that only visual memory of the bird, and after that only an abstract consciousness of death, gets passed along the generations.
Writer Peter Clothier stopped by CB1 during our installation of Friday and posted his insightful thoughts on eyes wide shut on his blog (scroll down midway through his post).
I found myself thinking, inevitably, about the havoc our species wreaks upon our environment, and upon the other species who have the misfortune to have to share the Earth with us. Oblivious to their beauty and their role in the ecological integrity of the planet, we heedlessly pollute the skies that are the province of the birds, destroying those whose natural skills we manage to emulate only with massive, noisesome, lumbering machines of our own invention.
The elegiac quality of these images will surely touch your heart, and their sheer beauty will captivate your eye.
