Stories, Cities, Makeshift Structures

Slought is pleased to announce "Stories, Cities, Makeshift Structures," an exhibition of selected films by Shelly Silver, on display from January 16, 2015 to February 20, 2015. An opening reception will take place on Friday, January 16 from 6:30-8:30pm, and will feature a conversation between the artist and film scholar Nora Alter. A second conversation between the artist, poet Brian Teare, and filmmaker Jenny Perlin will take place on Monday, February 16 from 6:30-8:00pm, and will explore topics including gender, sexuality, voyeurism and narrative in Silver's recent work.

Unlike traditional narrative or documentary films, which often rely on pre-scripting and rigid structures of pre-production, production and post-production, Silver moves fluidly in her work between shooting, editing and writing to create a loose matrix of essay films. The particular works on view at Slought -- including TOUCH (2013), in complete world (2008), What I'm Looking For (2004), suicide (2003), and Former East/Former West (1994) -- were filmed almost entirely in public space, where the civic rubs up against individual desires/needs. In these narratives exploring contemporary identity, truth and fiction are often in doubt, the veracity of what is seen and what is not seen is questioned, and the modes by which information is disclosed, withheld and mediated hold meaning. Appropriating the structures and codes of television and cinema narratives, Silver relies on the viewer's complicity in watching and their desire to believe and identify with conventions and characters.

The very act of watching others, and doing so in public, forms the basis of these works. In recent decades, the collective act of looking and being looked at has often been discouraged and disparaged. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, writer and activist Jane Jacobs argues for the importance of watching, and describes it as the fabric that holds us together as feeling, empathic creatures. Jacobs highlights the crucial importance of "eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street." Today, we have different kinds of "eyes" on the street, in the form of disembodied surveillance cameras, faux street lamps with black bulbs, and a wide variety of one-sided technologies which invisibly record and monitor our movements, renting the social contract. This co-optation of public space and the anxiety it generates is transferred, according to Silver, to those we do see and the people we share the streets with, whether they have cameras or not. Resisting this tendency, Silver's characters have a spectrum of relations with the viewer, who is often addressed directly and at times even playfully as another character in the films, one who is both desired and implicated.