AMY SILLMAN
Draft of a Voice-over for Split Screen Video Loop
May 12- June 28, 2012
Opening reception : Saturday, May 12, from 5 to 9 pm
The artist and Lisa Robertson will be present.
We’ve been anticipating this exhibition for months, and for some of us here, literally, for years.
Amy Sillman is one of our favorite artists, period.
An invigorating painter who straddles the dialectic between abstraction and figuration; between the physicality and intellectuality of painting; prose and ideal in drawing; a virulently witty writer, notably within her one-dollar zine The O-G; an enthralling conversationalist with a knack for (self-)irony and permanent (self-)invention: Amy Sillman is constantly showing us how to think, how to decide, how to behave.
It entails a lot of head-scratching—and disgruntlement—to try to understand why the 55-year old New York artist has had no survey exhibition in Paris yet. On the other hand, we can certainly feel privileged to operate in a city where a scrappy organization like castillo/corrales can come forward and introduce an artist like Amy Sillman to a new audience.
“Draft of a Voice-over for Split Screen Video Loop” premieres a work that stems from a recent development in the practice of the artist: an animated film with a voiceover poem, using almost 2000 drawings Sillman made on standard quotidian devices such as the iPhone and the iPad. Adapted and titled from a poem written in 2009 by the admired Canadian poet and essay writer Lisa Robertson (also a co-editor of our recent Paraguay Press’ mammoth Revolution: A Reader), the film is both seditious and seductive, abstract and explicit, partial and theoretical, as it explores in concert with the text, the feminine modes of subjection and resistance.
The central element in the exhibition, this new film is presented next to a number of drawings selected from the mass that constitutes its course. One will find them in various formats, on different papers, and at a wide range of prices, following another defining characteristic of Sillman’s approach: a drive to challenge the logic of market conditions, access to artworks, and what constitutes the viewer’s gallery experience.
As the archetypal exhibition press release sentence goes: We are absolutely delighted to present Amy Sillman’s first one-person exhibition in a French institution. And this is no convention of expression. We mean it.