Susan Silton’s exhibition title for her five new large-scale color photographs, does not actually refer to the film, The Day the Earth Stood Still.  While these photos are underpinned by film stills Silton chose of mid-century sci-fi films, the title refers to a still used from a different (but probably similar) film, The Day the Earth Caught Fire.

The tension between “standing still” and “catching fire” is at the center of these five new works.  Huge and vibrant bands of color overlay the already-mentioned stills in a way that simultaneously recalls the ambitions of a cluster of mid-century media and genre:  These range from minimalist abstraction and hard-edge color field painting, to the promise of Technicolor and VistaVision, to the utopian (or dystopian) future laid out in the films from which Silton has chosen her images.

But the photographs aren’t simply a history lesson.  They’re too large and emphatic to succeed at much in the way of a history course; the sheer visual presence of the photographs is completely overwhelming.
And the experience of looking at the works more than trumps any thinking you’ll do about the work—and if you’re like me, a lot of thinking, because there’s a lot to think about.  (Note here that the digital image you see alongside this pick doesn’t really do the work justice: in the flesh, as it were, the images “under” and in the stripes are much more easily readable, and the colors are deeper and richer.)

 The tension I mentioned between staying still and bursting into activity is at the heart of this new work because—and I mean this in a good way—the photographs are almost hard to look at.  In a time when many photographs can be “got” from a first glance, Silton’s images both push you in and pull you away, optically and psychologically.  The more you look at a given image, the harder it can become to see the image as a whole.  This leads one all the more to want to try to figure out the meaning behind Silton’s choice of film stills, which are heavily loaded to begin with.

In Ladybug, Ladybug, for example, the lack of eye connection of the three characters standing together, caught between the stripes, becomes haunting even as the Op Art effect of staring at such hard, vibrant color for so long becomes disconcerting on an entirely different level.  And the optic effects are such that it almost seems as if the film still’s figures are moving under or between the stripes, struggling with their place themselves.

So, while other photographs may win you over via what they depict, Silton, in this and other work, has been playing with the phenomenology of the still and moving image, and she’s reached the point where these are the most interactive still photographs I’ve ever seen.  When you see the work in person—which you should—plan on spending more time there than you’d think you would, waiting for the still images to burst off the wall in a flame of activity and color.

(*Images, from top to bottom:  Susan Silton, The Day, the Earth; October 6 - November 16, 2007; SolwayJones Gallery, Ladybug, Ladybug from The Day, the Earth; 2006, chromogenic print, 73 x 60 in, Courtesy of Susan Silton & SolwayJones Gallery; Susan Silton, The Day, the Earth; October 6 - November 16, 2007; SolwayJones Gallery, Fail Safe from The Day, the Earth; 2006, chromogenic print, 73 x 60 in, Courtesy of Susan Silton & SolwayJones Gallery; Susan Silton, The Day, the Earth; October 6 - November 16, 2007; SolwayJones Gallery, The Day the Earth Caught Fire from The Day, the Earth; 2006, chromogenic print, 73 x 60 in, Courtesy of Susan Silton & SolwayJones Gallery.)