Jeanne Silverthorne
"[8][9][10] Art in America critic Raphael Rubinstein wrote that, like the late studio paintings of Philip Guston, Silverthorne examines "deeply melancholic realms, enlivened by the occasional mordant joke, in which lowly objects are relentlessly and lovingly queried for a meaning they never seem quite ready to yield.
[4][26][27] Reviews characterize these sculptures as anti-heroic, anti-formalist, anthropomorphic and reminiscent of aspects of work by Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Fischli & Weiss and Richard Tuttle, among others;[25][28][29][30] New York Times critic Roberta Smith described them as "burnt offerings, small catastrophes that have just walked out of a cartoon.
[32][33][6][8] Conceptually, this work investigates metaphors for the human body and its systems, the artist's creative process and psyche, decay, and the exhaustion of studio-art conventions of authorship and the hand, mastery and mimesis, originality, and timelessness;[3][34][2][35] Artforum noted in this project a sense of profound loss and romanticism beneath "cool strategies.
"[3] In exhibitions at ICAP (1996) and the Whitney Museum at Philip Morris (1999), Silverthorne reworked tiny casting fragments resembling packing-case noodles into large black rubber sculptures that offered an ironic, absurdist take on the persistence of 19th-century artistic tropes and contemporary desperation for new visual forms.
[6][4][31][1] The Whitney installation (The Studio Stripped Bare, Again, referencing Duchamp) featured swags of black electrical cords hung from a high atrium ceiling and spilled across floors, which converged on a grey, cast light bulb suspended over two of the tiny fragments under a magnifying glass.
[44][2] Shows at Shoshana Wayne (2002) and the Albright–Knox Gallery (2003) featured a centrally located Plexiglas vitrine containing two identical female figures (one with red hair, the other with gray) with their knees drawn up, that Holly Myers suggested were the "vehicles" within which Silverthorne's surrounding emotional machines operated.
[9] Silverthorne's later exhibitions have been described as compendia of her prior bodies of work and preoccupations—existential, sometimes macabre meditations leavened by humor, skepticism about artmaking, and new wrinkles, such as kinetic elements, metaphorical vignettes, cast shipping crates, observer-like caterpillars and ecological themes.
[46][48][57][58] Later shows featured vignettes that served as metaphors for Silverthorne and her creative process: casts of her studio floor invaded by weeds and insects; a moth drawn to light; Suicidal Sunflower (2014), a black-and-white flower strangled by an electric cord noose; Self-Portrait as a Fly With Glasses (2017).
[35][2][55][8] Silverthorne's exhibition “Down the Hole and Into the Grain” (Shoshana Wayne, 2014) consisted of fifty sculptures of mainly office items (actual-size chairs and desks, computers, light bulbs and fixtures, supplies) in neat rows like storage areas, their ordinariness upset by oversize pencils, caterpillars and flies and undersized figurines and skeletons.
[59] The Brooklyn Rail compared her dull, cast lightbulbs (that can't shine) and outlets without electricity to corporeal phantoms, like the fictional monster, that imitate perfectly but are divorced from the reality; the show included the sculpture Frankenstein, a glowing book propped open on a plinth with text meticulously copied from original in invisible ink that was made visible by UV light.
