The site-specific exhibition An Opera of Whispers brings together artists Joy Episalla, Suzanne Silver, and Sivan Silver-Swartz within the Slash library site; an embodied thoroughfare in dialogue. All three artists create an archive of marks and sound capturing fugitive moments, hauntingly poetic, a combination that constructs a network of language patterns open to multiple readings.

Joy Episalla returns to the Bay Area, where she graduated from California College of the Arts and Crafts in the 70s, after a long hiatus. Episalla’s works, “foldtograms” made from an entire roll of photographic paper, are a series of sculptural prints produced from the darkroom process of cameraless photography (develop, stop, fix, and wash, not necessarily in that order). Through this method, she creates a private “pliant forward motion of articulation and re-articulation” that performs itself over time in various acts of folding, creasing, and manipulating the paper, “‘carrying its histories’” in chance occurrences. 

Suzanne Silver assembles and collages messages through distortion and invention — an abstract process encoding and cracking pieces of existing communication systems beyond the literal. Silver borrows from existing visual communication systems to reveal hidden images and complex memories and emotions. Her drawings and objects continue to investigate the possibility of expressively legible vocabularies, employing quotidian modes of transmission.

For An Opera of Whispers, Suzanne Silver will work in collaboration with her son, Sivan Silver-Swartz, who is providing a score for her installation. Silver-Swartz produces experimental music through notated composition, performed song, and installation. When making music, he thinks about just intonation, information aesthetics, duration, cyclicality, and counterpoint.

Both Episalla and Silver archive acts of utterance or expression — intrinsic modes of transmission — suggesting mementos of shadow and light. Whereas Episalla’s works catalogue an ephemeral wrinkled pattern language, Silver’s works are a series of vanishing acts, gestures of Morse code detritus. An Opera of Whispers falls within the inventory of visual abstractions in strength and fragility, impermanent in nature, depicting visceral sensation — a dialogue in the territory of sculpture. —Margaret Tedesco

An Opera of Whispers, curated by Margaret Tedesco, is the second in a series of six-month exhibitions and projects in our library, each organized by Bay Area-based guest curators and artists with longer-term, archive-, research-, and community-based practices. The exhibition will be accompanied by inperson and online public programs.

/ (Slash)