Suzanne Silver is an Associate Professor in the Painting & Drawing Program of the Department of Art at The Ohio State University. Silver studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris and received an AB from Smith College and an MFA at The Ohio State University. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including the Axel Raben Gallery in NYC, Nexus Contemporary Art Center in Atlanta, Contemporary Jewish Museum - San Francisco, David Yellin College in Jerusalem, the Castle of Otranto in Otranto, Italy, Pierogi Gallery, Soloway Gallery, and Proteus Gowanus in Brooklyn, the Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati, The Bureau for Open Culture, and the Columbus Museum of Art.
Silver has received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award and grants in mixed media and in 3d art from the Greater Columbus Arts Council and drawing from the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Her artist’s book Blacklists/Whitelists was published by Logan Elm Press. Silver’s art and writing have appeared in such publications as the American Abstract Artists Journal and Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture and can be found in the Avant-Writing Collection at OSU.
Silver makes drawings, paintings, objects, and installations where unexpected materials are combined to create a visual language that is open to multiple readings.
http://beelergallery.org/suzanne-silver-codes-and-contingencies/
http://issuu.com/smsilver/docs/cartoon-geometry-web
https://educationabroad.osu.edu/index.cfm?FuseAction=Programs.ViewProgram&Program_ID=10401
Artist's Statement
For a Long Time I Used to Go to Bed Early (IDEAS SLEEP) is an oneiric assemblage of thoughts about sleep and the waking life. Its origins stem from two very different sources—one a quote from the opening line of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, the other a sentence construction from the linguist Noam Chomsky. The trigger is the sentence from Chomsky, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”, a semantically suspect but syntactically sound combination of words. Proust’s words, “For a long
time I used to go to bed early”, prompted my own ideas on sleep, dreams, Eros, the active life versus the contemplative, and creativity. It allowed me to make work about making work.
I have combined unexpected materials such as felt, wool, wood, metal, and wheels to explore the order and disorder of language and the evasive relationship of word and image.
Conjunction Series (if, and, or, but)
The ongoing Conjunction Series consists of clusters of heterogeneous forms that may resemble word groupings yet have no semantic system. Can they generate meaning? The small felt, wood, metal, and vinyl works usually appear in groups of four (“if” “and” “or” “but”).
Images from the Dec 2013 residency of American artist, Suzanne Silver. Part of her ongoing project “interventions ludiques” (interventi giocosi) A note from Suzanne describing the project:
"....The project continues in Jerusalem where we have been since the end of my residency at the Siena Art Institute....it is part of a year-long project on the ephemeral line that I will conduct in Paris, Siena, and Jerusalem. I brought pieces of porcelain (crude line fragments) with me that I made at The Ohio State University last spring. I find physical and/or conceptual lines in space during my walks, set down the fragments, photograph them, and leave. At the end of my stay in each city I have left element of the installation in place; otherwise I retrieve my fragments. I am making accessories such as a belt or a hat or a vest so that I can wear the lines on me to make it easier to do the interventions on site. I have also included examples of the small map and pattern-based works on paper that I made in the resident artist studio in Siena. It was very nice to have a studio for the month. The residency was a fantastic experience and December was, as it turns out, a wonderful time to be there."
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