Aviva Silverman: Protect Me From What I Am

Silverman’s sculptures often take the form of intricate dioramas and tableaux, some suggesting votive shrines common to historically Catholic regions. 

Seen en masse, the plastic icons suggest repetitive affirmations, troubled by the presence of faulty figurines that Silverman acquired alongside their finished counterparts. 

As a result of accidents in the production process, certain characters appear in states of headlessness, dissolution or recombination, suggesting a form of ecstatic decreation or even divine intervention. 

A series of photographic works, entitled The Mirror of the Simple Souls Who Are Annihilated and Remain Only in Will and Desire of Love (2018), is displayed on light boxes. 

Wearing theatrical, brightly colored costumes reminiscent of those used in school nativity plays, as well as prosthetic ears, wings and noses, a group of Silverman’s friends are pictured posing at a farm in upstate New York.

Using familiar compositional strategies from Catholic iconography & William Blake etchings, the figures are captured in scenes of prayer & mischief in a form of Biblical cosplay that suggests the endless variations on those scenes. 

For a work titled Assimilation (2018), Silverman constructed a cube from the faulty icons, on which an arrangement of taxidermy birds are arranged. 

A constructed shadow box, The Shadow of a Shadow (2018) contains a mise en scène depicting the implausible moment in 2014 when Pope Francis released peace doves from the Vatican and one was immediately attacked mid-air by a crow. 

Recreated by a taxidermist, the dove and crow are displayed hovering mid-status between object and symbol, placed in a hall of broken mirrors that suggests an infinite quality to the encounter.

In repatriation of the aura (2018), a glass vessel with subtle suggestions of an angelic form envelops a pair of wooden praying hands, as though a dancing spirit is both protecting and claiming a prayer.