Four of Silverthorne’s pieces riff whimsically on the tradition of the floral still life. “Phosphorescent Pink With Flies,” “Dandelion Clock,” “O Rose” and “Poppies” all depict fat, rubber flowers bursting out of black rubber picture frames like 3-D paintings. True to the spirit of the vanitas genre, which emphasizes the transience of beauty and the inevitability of death and decay, Silverthorne’s flowers are beset by creepy, crawling insects. (“Vanitas” is the Latin word for vanity and relates to the biblical admonition that “all is vanity.”)
Other works by Silverthorne relate less literally to the Phillips paintings. The titular insect of her “Moth and Bulb,” for example, hovers very near Braque’s “Bird,” in an evocation of flight. But the bug is doomed; he’s heading straight for a light bulb.
In other cases, Silverthorne merely plays off a particular shape: Painter Henri Rousseau’s “The Pink Candle” relates both to Silverthorne’s “Long Fuse” and “Short Fuse,” which feature candlelike sticks of dynamite, and to her “DNA Candelabra,” an elaborate installation that includes double-helix-shaped tapers.
Dynamite, for obvious reasons, is associated with destruction and death. But what does DNA have to do with vanitas? According to the subtitle of Silverthorne’s candelabra piece, the work depicts the genetic code that’s associated with a predisposition for “anxiety, addiction, anger and panic.”
Those will take a few years off your life.
At first glance, Silverthorne’s “Task Chair” — a life-size model, in rubber, of a swivel chair — seems to have little to do with any of the paintings, visually or conceptually, let alone with the idea of vanitas. It’s positioned between two paintings: Milton Avery’s “Pink Still Life,” featuring a pipe, matches and a liquor bottle; and Pierre Bonnard’s “Bowl of Cherries.”
The artist explains that the chair, which is modeled on a piece of furniture she owns and uses, represents the studio, or, as she puts it, “a place of entropy and loss.” That’s funny; I always thought of the studio as a place of birth and creativity. Isn’t it museums, as philosopher Alan Watts once observed, where art goes to die?
Perhaps that’s Silverthorne’s point. Maybe the very act of artmaking is a futile albeit beautiful gesture of resistance against death. One of the qualities of rubber that appeals to the artist is what she calls the material’s “deliquescence.”
In other words, unlike marble sculpture — but much like human flesh — it melts. It’s not by accident that the little rubber crates featured in “Jeanne Up and Down,” a piece that includes two doll-size self-portraits of the artist, look like coffins.
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