Gina Buenfeld
“New York-based artist Amy Sillman is best known as a painter, but this exhibition presents the breadth of her practice from works on canvas and paper, to screen printing, video animation and her self-published zines.
This work is a fragment of an installation conceived for Gallery 3 in part of Sillman’s solo show at Camden Arts Centre, because the artist was keen to respond to the architectural features of the original Victorian library building with its huge windows.
Sillman has bisected the gallery diagonally with a wire, from which she has suspended a series of works on paper. As they are double-sided, you can move all around them and see them front and back, an innovation that shifts the traditional form of viewing works in a frame and enables you to see the thin membrane each piece relies on for its form.
There is a recurring motif that morphs and develops across the sequences of the 30 or so pieces. It is a cartoonish figure – derived from a series of drawings Sillman did after Donald Trump’s election as US president – that is depicted in various states of distress or angst, veering from figuration to abstraction and often contorting or vomiting.
The original black-and-white drawings feature on one side of the paper, while the other screen-printed sides feature the figure dissolving into layers of colour and polka-dot patterns.
There’s an oscillation between the figure and the ground, and you are not often sure which is which or where one ends and the other begins.
The dots are reproduced in horizontal stripes – a common theme in the exhibition – which not only suggest medieval heraldry, but also the symbolic pattern of detention centres and prisons, where people of dubious character are often made to wear striped clothing.
Sillman’s images come from the same satirical language of painting used by the painter Philip Guston. The cartoonish elements are often like emojis.
Sillman builds up her images over time with repeated reworking, layering, screen printing, painting and drawing. It’s an extension of the work she uses in her zines, the back catalogue of which is at the arts centre alongside a new issue created for the show. The biggest difference, of course, is that this new work is on pieces of paper the size of a human body, which are suspended in space across a gallery.
I think the pieces are quite musical; the title of this work – Dub Stamp – refers not just to the process of naming something but also references the sub-genre of reggae in which a producer emphasises and highlights different instruments in a track.
Sillman works in a similar way and thinks of colour quite rhythmically – the polka dots are certainly pulsing – as she remixes the recurring motif like a sequence of echoes and reverberations.”
Interview by John Holt. Amy Sillman: Landline is at Camden Arts Centre, London, until 6 January 2019
Gina Buenfeld is a curator at Camden Arts Centre in London
This work is a fragment of an installation conceived for Gallery 3 in part of Sillman’s solo show at Camden Arts Centre, because the artist was keen to respond to the architectural features of the original Victorian library building with its huge windows.
Sillman has bisected the gallery diagonally with a wire, from which she has suspended a series of works on paper. As they are double-sided, you can move all around them and see them front and back, an innovation that shifts the traditional form of viewing works in a frame and enables you to see the thin membrane each piece relies on for its form.
There is a recurring motif that morphs and develops across the sequences of the 30 or so pieces. It is a cartoonish figure – derived from a series of drawings Sillman did after Donald Trump’s election as US president – that is depicted in various states of distress or angst, veering from figuration to abstraction and often contorting or vomiting.
The original black-and-white drawings feature on one side of the paper, while the other screen-printed sides feature the figure dissolving into layers of colour and polka-dot patterns.
There’s an oscillation between the figure and the ground, and you are not often sure which is which or where one ends and the other begins.
The dots are reproduced in horizontal stripes – a common theme in the exhibition – which not only suggest medieval heraldry, but also the symbolic pattern of detention centres and prisons, where people of dubious character are often made to wear striped clothing.
Sillman’s images come from the same satirical language of painting used by the painter Philip Guston. The cartoonish elements are often like emojis.
Sillman builds up her images over time with repeated reworking, layering, screen printing, painting and drawing. It’s an extension of the work she uses in her zines, the back catalogue of which is at the arts centre alongside a new issue created for the show. The biggest difference, of course, is that this new work is on pieces of paper the size of a human body, which are suspended in space across a gallery.
I think the pieces are quite musical; the title of this work – Dub Stamp – refers not just to the process of naming something but also references the sub-genre of reggae in which a producer emphasises and highlights different instruments in a track.
Sillman works in a similar way and thinks of colour quite rhythmically – the polka dots are certainly pulsing – as she remixes the recurring motif like a sequence of echoes and reverberations.”
Interview by John Holt. Amy Sillman: Landline is at Camden Arts Centre, London, until 6 January 2019
Gina Buenfeld is a curator at Camden Arts Centre in London
