Greetings from Olduvai Gorge. The filming of ERASHATA has been completed. After a difficult start attempting to secure permissions from various parties and learning the art of bribery I have mastered the East African Handshake. I have been graciously welcomed to the area by my good friend Olle Moita and his family. Living with him at Olduvai Gorge I have been able to further understand a dynamic that is present between his traditional Maasai life and that of the paleoanthropological excavations that have been carried out in the area. The thing that Olle Moita most wanted me to film was his cattle, which are considered the vitality of a man and his worth. The cattle said “Say as many words about me as I have hairs in my body”.

– Guston Sondin-Klausner, January 31, 2008

Susan Silton’s first solo show at SolwayJones comprised five gregariously colorful, large-scale chromogenic prints (all 2006-07) that fuse an irresistible decorative sensibility with shrewd sociopolitical provocation. Each image presents a lustrous translucent veil of digitally rendered vertical stripes over a film still drawn from a camp-tragic, mid-20th-century nuclear apocalypse drama (which also gives each work its title). Operating as an interference layer between viewer and image, this striped membrane partially occludes the still, but also heightens interest in the obscured pictorial details.

On the Beach, for example, reproduces a still from the morbid 1959 film starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner. A radiant array of cheery colors screens an image of Peck and Gardner frozen in a melancholy embrace, presumably contemplating their fate in the approaching atomic holocaust. Silton’s strategy remains consistent in Panic in Year Zero, which shows a disconsolate man and woman showered with green stripes. In this instance, the still was drawn from a 1962 film that relates the travails of a family on a fishing expedition after they realize that Los Angeles has been flattened by a nuclear attack.

The title of Silton’s show ”The Day, The Earth” was drawn from Val Guest’s alarmist movie of 1961, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, which portrays the global hysteria that ensues when the United States and the Soviet Union simultaneously detonate nuclear weapons, knocking the earth off its axis and sending the planet careening toward the sun. The film is one of the Cold War era’s more explicit cautionary tales and Silton’s reference to it indicates her conviction that the dangers of the current political climate should be a source of great concern.

Her convictions are not always expressed as indirectly. A recent project one in an ongoing series of text-based works that Silton either mails out or distributes in public places for the Los Angeles-based journal X-TRA involved producing a number of garish, fluorescent postcard inserts that feature texts translated from leaflets originally printed in Arabic and airdropped over Afghanistan by the U.S. Army. Silton’s use of colored stripes as a sort of “packaging” (evocative of commercial graphics, caption frames, video broadcast patterns, etc.) for the nuclear-themed photographs reflects her political concerns. The esthetically enhanced stills ask us to consider how slick design inflects the way we receive information not only in art, but via media sources as well about even the most dire subjects. Ultimately, however, the extent to which Silton’s images expose and/or effectively critique prevailing strategies of mediation remains an open question, since the essential weapon of that critique her signature stripes is the very attribute that differentiates the works from their movie-still sources, making them autographic, appealing and ultimately salable.

Christopher Bedford
February 2008 p.154

Copyright © 2008 Brant Publications, Inc.

Though wildly diverse, Susan Silton’s works of the past decade nonetheless share elements of formal experimentation and aesthetic choice, and employ coded imagery and iconography to deliver socially and politically charged messages. Recently, Silton has made a series of works playing on stripes, including a project currently on view at the Pasadena Museum of California Art for which she covered the museum’s exterior in the sorts of striped tarpaulins used on houses undergoing fumigation, and another in which she filled an interior space with found objects unified only by their striped surfaces.

At SolwayJones, Silton displayed five works, all from a 2006-2007 series titled, “The Day, The Earth.” These digital photographic prints are derived from stills from cold war-era doomsday-themed movies that revolve around the plights of people faced with impending or recent nuclear devastation or environmental disaster. Silton divided each still into eighty-four narrow vertical strips, then tinted each of these such that any one point appears as essentially monochromatic, while the hue shifts along the length of the strip. The gradated tinting also results in changing levels of saturation and contrast that variously enhance and obscure the photographic images.

Beside one another, the strips become stripes, with the contrast in hue, intensity, and value varying along the length of the border between any two of them, such that the entire composition becomes a shimmering field within which the photograph seems to fade in and out. The works thereby become destabilizing abstractions with the dazzling, dizzying effect of early paintings by Bridget Riley. Add to this lessons Silton learned from Daniel Buren’s plays on the stripe’s shifts in decorative, abstract, and referential potential with regard to context, and the sorts of wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing plays between imagery and abstraction, the onerous and the beautiful, found in Jack Goldstein’s paintings, and you begin to get where this work is going.

It’s easy enough to make out the mugs of Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner in Silton’s work On the Beach, 2006-2007, but you might not be familiar with the 1964 film from which it borrows its title and underlying image a tale of post apocalyptic survivors in the Southern Hemisphere coming to grips with their cataclysmically jumbled relationships and realities while awaiting the slow doom of radiation poisoning via fallout drifting down from the already annihilated north. And you’d have to be a serious movie buff to recognize amid Silton’s stripes images lifted from the films The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1963) and Fail-Safe (1964). But you don’t even need to know the titles to know the sorts of story lines captured in these stills, populated by figures who wear worry on their faces as they variously brace and embrace one another, look off toward the horizon or up into the sky with gazes of curiosity and dread, and pray for release from futures of military and environmental horror.

Like the cyanide-laced cup of tea the character Mary opts for near the end of On the Beach, Silton’s photo-infused striped fields are sweet delivery systems carrying bitter doses. Consequently, their methods become their metaphors, as, too, does the perpetually shifting contextual play, as slivers of differently tinted information vibrate against one another while gelling into yesteryear’s visions of tomorrow that resonate today.

Christopher Miles
January 2008 p.290

Copyright 2008 © Artforum International Magazine, New York, NY

Flying School 1

Flying School 2

Flying School 3

With these umbrellas, you might ask, ‘Why save them for a rainy day?’
By — Shana Ting Lipton

January 10, 2008

IN Los Angeles, things are often not what they appear to be. Actors double as waiters, and a winter’s day usually consists of sunny skies. What better locale for Quebec artist Diane Landry to present her unusual take on an everyday (yet rare in L.A.) object: the umbrella. In “Flying School,” her first L.A. solo installation show, opening at SolwayJones Gallery on Saturday, the common umbrella gets a makeover and is re-envisioned as the star of a sound, light and movement piece.

Upon entering the space, one is greeted by a series of 24 colorful standing umbrellas, in the throes of a computer-generated opus of motion and sound. A motor-driven accordion at each umbrella’s base exudes sound through synchronized pumping. Halogen lights shining up from their bases cast not rain clouds but flowery shadows of their rhythmic movement onto the ceiling. Think “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” for the Web 2.0 generation. Or, more poetically, “They open and close like human breathing,” says Landry. “They die and come alive again.”

Landry has been toying with lighting throughout her 20 years of creating installation work and performance art. “If you change the light, you can change the object,” she says. About a decade ago, she added to the mix the crucial ingredients of sound and movement. Though her re-interpretive usage of objects — salad spinners, dictionaries and bottles — fits nicely with today’s eco-friendly zeitgeist, she is reluctant to describe her work as recycled art. “It’s recycling the meaning of the object,” she says. “It’s made with objects that you recognize but I play with new meaning.”

Such is the case with the show’s title: “Flying School” — though not flying in the literal sense, but “flying away, flying to forget.” The installation has flown all over the world. Conceived in 2000, it has been shown in gallery spaces in Pittsburgh and Houston, throughout Canada, in Europe, Australia and now L.A. — just in time for the rainy season.

Copyright 2008 Los Angeles Times