Monday Night -- 05.12.03 -- Shelly Silver -- Presentation/Discussion

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please note:

instead of our usual start time of 7
we will begin at 7:30
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Contents:
1. About Monday
2. About Shelly
3. Links to Shelly
4. Next Week -- Zizek Reading 'Welcome to the Desert of the Real'

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1. About this Monday

What: Presentation/Discussion with Shelly Silver
When: 7:30pm (academic time)
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 5th Floor
Who: All are welcome

We invite all for what should be a special treat this coming Monday night.

Shelly Silver has been making/showing a wide range of film and video works
for 20 years. On this Monday Night, she will take us on a sort of tour
through this period, showing snippets, cuts, and ....

well, let's hear it directly from her:

For this presentation I will be showing work everywhere from 1986 to the
present, alot of different stuff, both fully and in fragments.

Some of the issues I'd like to deal with are
the space/cracks between things, often where I've situated myself and my
wandering work. This would include the transversing (chain sawing) of
various established genres, truth and fiction, public and private, the
representation of male and female, inside and outside, living and dead.
Linguistic holes. Ah yes, and at a more practical level, about the crack I
often find myself in (both useful and frustrating) between the art world,
the industry and the experimental film and video world.

And desire. I'd also like, in all this, to talk about desire.

Some of the work I may show/excerpt:
Meet the People
getting in.
The Houses That Are Left (trailer)
Former East/Former West
37 Stories About Leaving Home
small lies, Big Truth
1
evening (installation)
Hidden Between the Leaves (installation)
suicide (coming soon to a multiplex near you)

Clearly I will not have the chance to do all this, but on paper it looks
good....

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2. About Shelly

In Shelly Silver's enigmatic narratives of contemporary identity, truth and
fiction are constantly in doubt, the veracity of what is seen and what is
not seen is questioned, and the modes by which information is disclosed,
withheld and mediated hold meaning. Appropriating the structures and codes
of television and cinema narratives, Silver relies on the viewer's
complicity -- the expectation of how media stories are "read," the desire to
believe and identify with their conventions and characters. Blurring
authenticity and falseness, artifice and reality ('real' compared to what),
Silver often merges stylized black-and-white film with color video,
fragmented images with written text and sound, elements of documentary and
melodrama with comedy.

>From the elusive Things I Forget to Tell Myself (1989) to the multi-leveled
melodrama of The Houses That Are Left (1991), her fragmented narratives are
steeped in ironic inquiry. References to broadcast advertising and
television formats are informed by Silver's experience as a commercial video
editor. Investigating how contemporary identity is both reflected and
constructed by television and cinema, Silver questions storytelling,
role-playing and the means by which popular narratives articulate fictions
of the self.

She has been exhibited throughout the US, Europe and Asia at venues such as
MoMA, NYC, MoCA, LA, The Pompidou Center, Paris; The Kyoto Museum, Japan,
The ICA London, The London Film Festival, The Singapore Film Festival and
has won many awards including at The Leipzig International Documentary
Festival, The Australian Int'l Film & Video Festival and The Houston Int'l
Film Festival. Silver has received fellowships and grants from the NEA, the
DAAD, NYSCA, NYFA, the Jerome Foundation and Anonymous Was a Woman
Foundation.

Silver currently lives in New York where she teaches at The Cooper Union and
the MFA Program of Photography and Related Media at the School of Visual
Arts. She is an organizer of Nomads & Residents, a group of artists,
organizers and curators involved in organizing informal evening events
around contemporary issues: www.nomadsresidents.org

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3. Links

some places to find out more about my work:

http://www.shellysilver.com (pretty extensive and beautifully designed)
http://www.eai.org/eai/artist.jsp?artistID=256
http://videodatabank.org/

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4. Next Week -- Zizek Reading (Welcome to the Desert...)

Part 1
pg. 1-87

For the Monday after this one, we have scheduled a long overdue Reading
Group discussion. We will be forwarding more information, but the text
will be the Verso 2002 release, Welcome to the Desert of the Real.

It is an expanded version of what was sent days after September 11.

If you do not have the text, we will be sending info about how to download
it by this coming Monday.