The mixed-media installation, Ideas Sleep, by Ohio-based artist Suzanne Silver will be on view at Mary Baldwin University’s Hunt Gallery from February 15-March 12, 2010.
Silver is an assistant professor in the painting and drawing program of the Department of Art at The Ohio State University in Columbus. She studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, earned a BA from Smith College and an MF. at The Ohio State University. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including the Axel Raben Gallery in NYC, Nexus Contemporary Art Center in Atlanta, CJM in San Francisco, Michlelet David Yellin in Jerusalem, the Castle of Otranto in Otranto, Italy, the Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati, and The Bureau for Open Culture in Columbus, Ohio. Silver has received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and she has been awarded grants from the Greater Columbus Arts Council and the Virginia Commission for the Arts.
The artist says the following about the exhibition in Hunt Gallery: “Linguist Noam Chomsky’s famous sentence, Colorless green ideas sleep furiously, forms the basis of my site-specific installation. Chomsky’s specific combination of words, the meaning poetically nonsensical, had likely never before appeared together in the same sentence. However, the phrase can be parsed syntactically; the syntax of the sentence can be analyzed and diagrammed according to the rules. Its significance as a sentence and idea is more elusive. Is it meaningless or a profound yet contradictory arrangement of thoughts and sounds? [In this exhibition I attempt] to capture this combination of rational and irrational, poetic and absurd, through an unexpected ensemble of materials and approaches to the space … Throughout the exhibition, associations float or weave in and out as meaning is determined by piecing together the visual clues. I [combine] unpredicted materials such as felt, wool, wood, metal, and wheels to explore the order and disorder of language and the evasive relationship of word and image.”
A reception will be held for Silver on Monday, February 15, from 4:30-6 p.m. in Hunt Gallery. The public is invited to attend. Hunt Gallery is dedicated to the exhibition of contemporary work in all media by regionally and nationally recognized artists. The Gallery is open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. during the College’s academic year. Visit the Hunt Gallery Web site at: https://go.marybaldwin.edu/arts/huntgallery.php.