Carole Silverstein’s exhibition this ache in your heart is holy contains a recurring motif of the cosmic web found in sacred geometry. The web is an extension of Silverstein’s theme of the garden and its metaphor for healing and renewal, as well as a theme of rupture and repair. This is the artist's response to the rise of darkness and despair from our world’s multiple crises, and to the dramatic shift in her life as a mother with a son departing for college and adulthood. These paintings and watercolors are born out of this disorienting time. The cosmic web pattern becomes about re-weaving and re-building a sense of wholeness—personally and globally. For Silverstein, this is significantly guided by the concept of the Buddhist and Hindu “Indra’s net” which envisions the universe as an infinite web, exquisitely interdependent—as well as to the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, to repair a broken world.

The essence of Carole Silverstein’s work is to elevate the feminine and the sacred in a time our world desperately needs both. Silverstein explores the languages of ornamentation and their sensuous and extravagant beauty in a hand-painted, embodied way. Her work embraces a feminine intelligence and power that is a healing medicine and antidote to an oppressive patriarchy. The artist aims to facilitate a dialogue between cultures that is in stark contrast to the polarized discourse she sees in our current world. In taking these patterns into a new conversation, she seeks to traverse fluid boundaries and identities, exploring their interconnections and points of contact. Silverstein is concerned with evoking spiritual states, and her art practice is both devotional and mystical. She traces by hand, combines, and alters ornamental forms from many cultures into seductive, labyrinthine spatial experiences. The artist is inspired mostly by non-Western patterns that celebrate a diversity of form, often acting as veils and screens to another consciousness.

“I make my art on the floor,” says Silverstein. “I alter the dense, trance-like patterns on the mylar, a surface which allows for translucency and reflectance. The process invites a meditative slowness for myself and the viewer. The acrylic inks are alternately reflective, metallic, matte, transparent, and opaque. As one views and moves through the room, the ambient light shifts one’s spatial experience as parts become illuminated, disappear, or recede. I also include floor drawings of metallic tape and satin fabrics in conversation with the paintings on the walls. This is to heighten a viewer’s spatial, perceptual, and bodily awareness. The floor installation also refers to sacred architecture and ritual, and invokes the higher spirits. I wish for my art to be both grounding and ethereal, intimate and expansive. By opening poetic contemplative space, my work triggers the imagination, hopefully sparking and building bridges between inner and outer worlds. These are heartfelt prayers for humanity.”

Carole Silverstein is a Los Angeles artist who received her MFA from Queens College CUNY and BFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago with additional summer study in Umbria, Italy. Silverstein’s art has been shown in galleries and alternative venues throughout the United States, and was featured in “We Must Risk Delight: 20 Artists from Los Angeles” at the 2015 Venice Biennale, an official collateral exhibition. Her work also was in a traveling exhibition in London, Paris, Berlin, Manila, Cape Town, and Johannesburg. Her artwork is in the Permanent Collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Art in US Embassies in Djibouti, Paradigm Talent Agency Beverly Hills, Citibank, Art for Healing, The Salser Collection, the Laura Dern Collection, and numerous private collections. Her prints were published in December Magazine, the Los Angeles Press and VoyageLA Magazine. In 2018 she traveled on an Art Research Grant to Andalusia, Spain and Morocco. She was recently awarded a 2024 Young Arts Creative Grant in support of this show. Her published full-color Painting Catalogue with essay by Elizabeta Betinski of BardoLA is now available at the gallery and select fine art bookstores. Silverstein has been a Sponsored Artist with two Artist Materials Grants since 2016. She has been using Grafix Drafting Film as well as Daler Rowney’s Acrylic Inks for many years, and wishes to thank them for providing materials for this show.

this ache in your heart is holy is Carole Silverstein's fourth show with Nancy Toomey Fine Art.