Jeanne Silverthorne, Crate with Sneaker, 2023 Platinum silicone rubber 50 x 18 x 18.5 in
Courtesy of the Artist and MARC STRAUS
at MARC STRAUS New York, 2023
SILENT OBJECTS- WORDLESS STORIES
by Rosanna Albertini
So, to introduce words is disruptive. It takes away the silence wrapped around each sculpture. I’m lucky the artist has a sense of humor, and isn’t afraid of throwing in our face her own struggle against explanations, in search of elusive, often movable meanings about feelings and experiences that are inscrutable, and stay hidden in the human carapace even when there is no need to keep the secret. On the other end, the visible objects she offers are soaked in lived and living real moments we all share, usually convinced they are uniquely shaped, personal, impossible to reveal or to compare with others’. Foolishness of course: there is a common, flexible mesh in which we are netted as we face the thread of our life, in which personal moments surge unexpected, at times unwanted. The artist follows what her hands draw on small notebooks, as if deciphering signals from her hidden self.
Jeanne Silverthorne Double Sneakers (The Three Sillies), 2023 Platinum silicone rubber 25.5 x 51 x 35.5 in Courtesy of the Artist and MARC STRAUS
Jeanne Silverthorne End of Day, 2016-2022 Rubber, rubber glass, hair, plastic, metal, phosphorescent pigment 3.5 x 10 x 10 in
Courtesy of the Artist and MARC STRAUS
Jeanne Silverthorne, In My Mother’s House, 2023 Platinum silicone rubber, 75 x 20 x 20 in (190.5 x 50.8 x 50.8 cm) Courtesy of the Artist and MARC STRAUS
Jeanne Silverthorne, Hanging Question Mark, 2020 Platinum silicone rubber 42 x 6 x 14 in Courtesy of the Artist and MARC STRAUS
Jeanne Silverthorne, Mom on Book, 2023 Platinum silicone rubber, hair, metal 7.25 x 10 x 8.25 in Courtesy of the Artist and MARC STRAUS
Not allowing us to decipher the hidden stories she sculpts giving legs and arms, shoes and boxing gloves to feelings that do not have a specific body, the artist sets free our will of understanding. Without permission, we put ourselves into a place where we are unwelcome. And it is the only way to appreciate Jeanne Silverthorne and her obsession with the invisible.
We try to grab her art out of any conventional definition, wondering at the same time about the effectiveness of our uncertain, entangled tools. Not the theories. In question are the uncontrolled interactions between eyes, invisible organs, emotions and ideas. Intellectual functions? Perhaps all of them. Our body thinks.
Understanding as an English word for instance, is mostly used like the latin com-prensione, comprehension, grabbing together, but the word in English has a different nature: it’s visual, and talks of standing under something. Let’s have a fantasy: I stand under Jeanne Silverthorne’s sculptures. There is no because, nor cause and effect. They are symbols suggesting emotional moments transformed into funny little theaters. Were I standing under the crown of a tree, time and stories would be embedded in the trunk and the branches, weather and animals would tell poems made with wind, chirping and lightenings, what words can do? They come after, read and describe the after facts.
Jeanne, or Banshee, — she calls herself Banshee in her self-portrait— is my tree. A fairy person from the Irish mythology in the form of a tree.
Her visual stories are a silent speech. Physical language meager and simple. With a big question mark and a couple of tiny quote signs. No quote in between. Mental strength is
a sturdy dolly 9,25 x 18 x 12 inches, not big at all. But the Fly, that cuts my breath. Animal fragility. The sneaker in a crate. She pulls my hair. Consternation becomes ridiculosus, in a 16th century corrupted latin. Jeanne’s bodies, either objects, plants or animalia, change as language always, adding colors and shapes, unraveling the tangled mess of thoughts. I’ll never forget her fly wearing glasses.
Jeanne Silverthorne, Double Dolly with Fly, 2021 Platinum silicone rubber, 9.25 x 18 x 12 in Courtesy of the Artist and MARC STRAUS
At the end of day she, Jeanne or Banshee, doesn’t want to see anymore. Dark glasses cover her eyes. The hammer remains in her hand. Work is done. The black book lies on the minimal bodies that are human even if they don’t look like it. Her mother’s figurine stands on the black book, maybe sealing the secret baggage of her journey. The artist carries the same book in her mind keeping it closed, no words escape.
Except in titles. Little crowns like night birds disappearing in darkness. As for me, the experience of the physical artwork asks for words expanding, deviating, using the eyes to caress the exterior surface of the sculptures, collecting possible meanings. Moreover, words have the power to navigate different times and make them durable on a page.
In the middle of the incredibly noisy reality hovering with too many words, too loud, often unreasonable and pretentious, the only existence we have, this recent work by Jeanne Silverthorne is a magic antidote. A voice from far away, as if from another world.
It echoes what Robert Musil wrote in 1925 (Toward a New Aesthetic):
“ If one simply extracts a few main, common characteristics from the purely descriptive accounts of a literature that is thousands of years old, one finds again and again the pressure of another world, like a solid ocean bottom from which the restless waves of the ordinary world have drawn back; and in the image of this world there is neither measure nor precision, neither purpose nor cause: good and evil simply fall away, without any pretense of superiority, and in place of all these relations enters a secret rising and ebbing of our being with that of things and other people.
It is in this condition that the image of each object becomes not a practical goal, but a wordless experience. “
It goes without saying that the dark baby, a book to be? starts his unfathomable night of dreams curling on the mountain of waves that we call reality.
Jeanne Silverthorne, And the Unfathomable Night of Dreams Began, 2022 Platinum silicone rubber, polymer clay, cloth
22 x 10 x 9 in Courtesy of the Artist and MARC STRAUS
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