Echolalias


Main Gallery
Echolalias
Angela Silver
February 12, 2016 – March 12, 2016

Performance: Friday, February 12, 2016 at 7:00 PM

Angela Silver is a visual artist working with the residue of language. Her research focuses on the itinerant ways language inhabits the body. Silver’s work raises questions about the way texts function in society, public and private spaces, and authority and agency, while offering hopeful alternatives to the everyday processes of communication, translation and human exchange.

For Echolalias, Silver will create a large scale, ephemeral drawing on the gallery walls using a hand-held typewriter ball as a drawing tool. Each strike of the ball will record marks on the wall with carbon paper. The work implicates and resuscitates an obsolete, intimate artifact, and the walls become a palimpsest. The delicacy and scale of the drawing demands close viewing.

Silver’s work questions the authority and agency of text by operating between conventional language structures and bodily experience. By forming radical ways the body can perform communication, she examines the representation of language while looking critically and poetically at Western society’s relationship with information and communication. She deconstructs and re-contextualizes systems of communication by repurposing writing machines and their paraphernalia.

Angela Silver is a PhD Candidate in Cultural Studies at Queens University. Her visual arts practice examines notions of absence through the residue of language. Using artifacts from writing systems she seeks to restructure and reorder language systems. Drawing on performance, she re-tools obsolete writing objects as a strategy to reconsider speech, writing and communication itself. She has exhibited at DAC in Brooklyn, DARE-DARE in Montreal, as well as in Beverly, MA, Quebec, Toronto, Rome, Calgary, Pittsburgh, and the Netherlands. Silver’s practice and research have been generously supported by, a J.W. McConnell Fellowship and a Social Sciences Humanities Research Council Fellowship. She currently teaches with Andrew King at the McGill School of Architecture.

The accompanying brochure is available below.

Performance: Friday, February 12, 2016 at 7:00 PM

During the opening reception, Angela Silver will perform with moribund communication tools .  The 7 pm performance concludes a week long, gallery scale drawing.  Captured with carbon paper, thousands of alphabetic marks coalesce, recording the strikes of the hand and the work of the body through a poetic shattering of language.