EFA STUDIO PROGRAM: Member Artists
Susan Silas
Lunchtime Studio Visit with Susan Silas
I am a visual artist working primarily in sculpture, video, and photography. I am interested in the way that historical forces intersect the personal and in how identity is formed. A significant body of my work, using my body as the exemplar, is an exploration of selfhood and how new technologies are affecting that understanding. My work examines the meaning of embodiment at a moment when artificial intelligence, whole brain emulation and external wombs are entering the realm of the possible. I am interested in the aging body, gender roles, and the fragility of sentient being.
My most recent project focuses on the relationship of humans to the animal kingdom and what the female body and the animal body share. These works were inspired by working with a Peregrine falcon in the Wyo- ming landscape and with a Mute Swan in a New York warehouse. New sculptural works construct hybrid forms that incorporate the remains of animals into my body; a way of thinking our materiality and our interdepen- dence. They also derive inspiration from John Berger’s beautiful essay, Why Look at Animals?, written in 1977. Berger states that consumer societies broke down the traditions that existed between man and nature, tra- ditions that recognized that “animals were with man at the center of his world.” Berger traces a shift in man’s relationship to animals, one in which the exchange of the gaze between them disappears. “In the accompanying ideology, animals are always the observed”, a phenomenon shared by women in patriarchal cultures. The gaze that entraps women and the one that ensnares animals is not the same but we share a form of embodiment that is forcefully relegated to the role of the observed: a gaze that limits exchange in order to attain mastery and exert power. That same notion of mastery and control has led to the exploitation of the environment and a disregard for the lives of others, be they human or animal. This work is an attempt to restructure space to explore new relationships and ways of thinking our shared environment at a time when women are losing their rights and more and more animals face extinction. It is part of a thirty year arc focused on embodiment.
I had a recent solo show of sculpture at Catskill Art Space, a survey exhibition at the University of Kentucky Art Museum, and a recent solo exhibition at Koli Art Space in Istanbul, at Studio 10 in Bushwick, New York and at CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles. My work was included in exhibitions at Stadgalerie Saarbrücken, in Germany, at Haus N Athen in Greece and at bitforms gallery, in New York. I was invited by Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence to speak at their recent conference, Digital (Im)mortality: Philosophy, Ethics and Design at the University of Cambridge and by Horasis USA to participate in their Shaping America’s Role in a Post-Pandem- ic World conference on a panel titled Reimagining the Contemporary. My work has been featured in AntiUtopias, Camera Austria, Fotómúvészet, Artnet magazine and Hyperallergic. I am a dual American and Hungarian citizen. (photo credit for second row of images: Zach Hyman)
