New York
For nearly three decades, Jeanne Silverthorne has treated the artist’s studio and all it encompasses as her subject. The work that gets made there, the furniture and tools, the person who makes the work (herself), and the workings of the artist’s body are all represented, along with memories, dreams, and discarded ideas. The other living creatures who share the studio–ants, flies, cater – pillars, moths, and spiders–are present as well. The purpose of this investigation is to examine the end of studio arts as a whole and the impossibility of this mode of expression regaining its former creative validity and vitality in today’s world. Her recent exhibition offered viewers a range of genres that were once the primary tools used by studio artists to explore the world and their reactions to it. The still-life was represented by floral arrangements, lamps, chairs, and packing boxes. The self-portrait was also present, most powerfully in Suicidal Sunflower (2014) in which a sunflower hangs from the cord of a work light, its desiccated roots draped over a packing crate. Self-Portrait as a Fly With Glasses (2017) consists of a larger than- life-size fly lying on its belly with its legs splayed out behind and its broken antennae hanging over a pair of black glasses…see the entire review in the print version of July/August’s Sculpture magazine.
