Sculptures by Silva or Stories in Search of Storytellers

At their best, stories encapsulate a truth about shared experiences. We need to believe in the possibility that our experiences can be shared. We trust in the existence of a commonality of feeling in relation our way of being in the world. We ground this trust in the knowledge of our participation to shaping the world in which we live. But we can never really know if and to what extent we actually share the feeling of being in the world. We construct and narrate stories and listen to them in an attempt to reaffirm our belief in the possibility of a shared experiential ground where we can meet. We find confirmation in communication.

Buck Silva has stories to tell, actually, stories to release. Her sculptures do not narrate but suggest tantalizing introductions with fragments apparently autobiographical. Familiar word combinations or well-known themes such as the seven deadly sins lead us into the works. But that’s as far as she guides into a terrain where, we sense, the telling of the story may have severe consequences. Have we heard it right? Do we know the definition of the words before we understand what the combinations mean? Do we grasp the rules that guide sense? A judgment about our adequacy lurks in these stories and, we fear, it might be pronounced any minute. The confessional quality of the autobiographical dimension dissolves as we feel implicated by an accusatory tone echoing between the works. They scan our fears and humiliations and extract suppressed memories that we find uncannily materialized in her sculptures. We strain to complete stories we thought were Silva’s before realizing they are ours, just as much.

Silva reminds us of those voices that still resonate in our minds as if etched in our psyche.  We have been coerced to narrate some stories as if they were ours. It seems that we have been selected by the stories, placed and activated by them. The stories may contain us. Latitude: 42° 21' 30" N, Longitude: 71° 03' 37" W is a boat nearly complete but lacking an outer skin. The coordinates place the un-seaworthy vessel in Boston, Silva’s hometown. The structure seems incapable to transport the glass containers arranged from A to Z that surmount it. Each glass pail sports a word signifying confinement. The boat appears to idealize movement so that it will never have to be undertaken. It confirms that the fulfillment of our desires may be what we fear the most.

Brainwash extends the theme of control into repression. The structure consists of two wooden ironing boards, one on top of the tripod that supports it and one on the floor below the legs. Both surfaces have sentences engraved by pyrography. The upper board refers to an accusatory explanation for the failure of a relationship where the speaker, in this case a father, takes no blame. A definition of the word “shadow” appears on the surface of lower board that appropriately acts like a shadow to the first. “Father” who withholds the power to judge and condemn can “flatten” with words those close to him and reduce them into his imperfect copies.

The poignancy of Unsolicited Advice should resonate with everyone who at any point in life encountered accusations and faced ridicule for failing to perform at prescribed standards. A conical dunce’s cap appears shy and diminutive before the outsized cone of a megaphone that seems ready to overwhelm it with an enormity of decibels. But irony threatens to subvert the established direction of power. The megaphone is merely a bigger dunce’s cap. Moreover, the alcove within which the smaller cone appears strangely recalls the niches where statues of saints are displayed for inspiring emulation among believers. Hence, Silva smirks as she pays homage to quiet endurance.

Natural Selection is as elaborate as it is puzzling. A freestanding steel armature resembles at once a three-storey house with pitched roof and a torso with a corset. The construction contains a horizontal grid surmounted by a network of rising sharp points. It seems that copper disks have rained through the structure, have gone past the grid and gathered in a mesh receptacle near the bottom of the armature. The points have impaled seven of the disks they keep suspended in mid air. The names of the seven deadly sins appear inscribed on these disks while the others remain blank. This complex setting locates a game at once cruel and arbitrary that assigns condemnations at random. A suggested cycle of movement within this “torso-house” guarantees that accusations shall find their chance victims. There is no escape; all shall look forward to their moment in the limelight of abuse.

Silva’s most recent edition of “wearable art” recalls girl-scout sashes decorated with badges denoting series of achievements. The Badger series display, on individual round badges, the artist performing the seven deadly sins. The theme explored in Natural Selection is reiterated here albeit with a lightheartedness that marks an overcoming of domination through accusations. Guilt is the catalyst that enables pleasure to be transformed into sin. Badger, then, takes on aspects of an invisible armor that works by rendering accusatory badgering ineffective.

Silva’s sculptures do not tell as much as they attract stories. She is interested in the stories they kindle and catch. There may be as many ways of telling the stories that Silva introduces with her works, as there are viewers who smile and nod before them.

Gerar Edizel

January 2010

Alfred, NY