Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present the 4th exhibition of new work by Jeanne Silverthorne.

The Invisible Worm continues Silverthorne’s decades-long investigation of the studio as a ruined site, available for excavation. “While there is always some kind of relationship between an artist’s studio and the work that gets made there, with Silverthorne the studio, and the building it’s in, become much more than a potentially influential architectural space . . . Silverthorne’s sculptures have been made not only in her studio but also about it and, even, of it. She has produced cast-rubber versions of the electric fixtures on the walls of her space, fashioned large abstract sculptures by enlarging tiny plaster scraps picked off the studio floor and, more intuitively than systematically, explored the space around her as a source of forms,” writes Raphael Rubinstein.

Sitting in the center of this new installation is a replica of the artist’s studio chair, fabricated in rubber with a faux wood-grain design.  It is accompanied by crates (actually used in shipping the works of this exhibition) and an easel, all similarly fashioned in a wood-grained rubber. The products of the studio—rubber still lifes, floral “paintings,” self-portraits—are scattered throughout.  A rubber trash can full of discarded rubber light bulbs suggests the overflow of rejected or “Bad Ideas.”  A visit to Brantwood, John Ruskin’s retreat, resulted in a nod to another studio in After Ruskin’s Bell Jar.  Flies alight everywhere. And a rubber plant thirsts for a drop of rubber water, forever withheld, tantalizingly out of reach.

The title The Invisible Worm is taken from William Blake’s allusion to hidden blight in his famous poem, O Rose, also the title of one of the rubber floral “pictures.” The works in this show flirt constantly with invisibility in their attention to minutia, as can be seen, for example in the tiny ant perched on another rubber plant in Everyone Knows an Ant Can’t.  There is also the hidden aspect of the inside of the rubber crates.  And, perhaps most significantly, many of the elements in these cast rubber works have an added invisible dimension in that they are phosphorescent.  Seen in the dark, they would glow with an eerie irradiance.

Despite what has been described as the “post-modern melancholy” of the work, in Silverthorne’s sculptures, as critic David Frankel remarks, “a kind of lurid vitality coexists with decay, an almost slapstick comedy abounds, and, not for the first time in Silverthorne’s art, the work is Beckett in sculpture.”

Jeanne Silverthorne lives and works in New York. She teaches Fine Art at Columbia University NY, Maine College of Art, ME and Faculty School of Visual Arts, NY. She has exhibited extensively including the Museum of Modern Art, NY, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA, P.S.1 Institute of Contemporary Art, Long Island City, NY, and the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA to name a few. She has received numerous awards including the National Endowment for the Arts Critic’s Fellow Award and the Penny McCall Foundation Grant.