99 Loop
03.03 - 26.03.2022

The only thing that fascinates me more than art is its audience. I think there is something inherently generative about experiencing something ‘together,’ where ‘together’ is an approximation of proximity rather than a set of agreed-upon experiences. We really struggle to see each other. So, in my mind, it makes sense to navigate one another – ourselves, even – through a separate object. A film. A musical performance. A painting. Through the reception and perception of the audience, these objects beget opinions. An audience’s reaction is as much about the work that prompted it as it is about the audience members themselves. What you ‘see’ and how you ‘see’ it speaks to the language of your personhood. A code is developed which is used to guide others to your perspectives and opinions, hoping that there is enough mutuality in this process to be understood. That, in doing so, we’re brought closer together.  What vital machinations allow us to share experiences with each other, and what can we glean when we consider the languages of interpretation?

Jonathan Silverman, Lungs in Hard Light, 2022. Image courtesy of Mia Thom.

Jonathan Silverman’s latest solo exhibition, ‘Mineral Vegetal Digital,’ meets these musings in the middle of the maelstrom. It is described by the accompanying text as “[a body of work that] remains deeply rooted in his ongoing enquiry into whether our digital lives are dislocating humans ever further from the organic environment and in what ways this detachment is simultaneously natural and dehumanising.” There is a tension that permeates, buzzing with the knowledge of the consequences of our behaviours. On, or offline. We are, after all, accountable for the culmination of what Silverman calls ‘natural’ and ‘dehumanising’. Its meaning, in fact, is the sum total of our shared experience. It’s actuality, I suppose. In adjusting to each wave of technological advancement, our actions have adjusted in tandem. The means we use to express ourselves and the variables that collect to define meaning have broadened in their spectrum. And yet, what persists is as telling of our nature as what has changed. “Truth is ambiguous,” the ending of the show’s text warns, “so too, what we perceive as natural or unnatural.”

Jonathan Silverman, Mineral Vegetal Digital installation view, 2022. Image courtesy of Mia Thom.

There is a false sense of peace in ambiguity, until you realise that your creations and opinions cannot control the idea that birthed them. That something shared is something changed. An especially interesting narrative Silverman dabbles in is the migration of our ideals and behaviours into digital space and what they become in the process. I’ve made the comparison before: physical proximity being indicative of ‘class’, and digital proximity being indicative of ‘clout’. Social standing has mutated (along with other learned behaviours) in our white supremacist, capitalist society. As we pour these same patterns into different moulds, we create reiterations of violence at the cost of our familiarity. For the sake of ‘that’s just how it is’, and the ‘natural’ ‘order’ of things. In the throes of such thinking, the voices of the audience are crucial. An audience makes space to gauge human nature’s present tense. If anything, to prove how many variations, deviations and misrepresentations make up the conundrum we all share. 

Jonathan Silverman, Piero’s Trees, 2022. Image courtesy of Mia Thom.

Who or what emerges through the psychedelic palette of Silverman’s latest offering? The collection is a trove of living things in the afternoon light of the gallery. Piero’s Trees (2022) and Lungs in Hard Light (2022) call you forward from outside. Nestled between these two larger works is Tree of Knowledge (2022), a captivating swarm of colour and warmth that emanates outward. The heat at the centre of the work isn’t spared from breaths of linen juxtaposing the acrylic textures. Lungs in Hard Light (2022), in particular, is an example of Silverman’s talent in rendering shape, space and saturation in such a way that generates various interpretations, making room for the audience in the emphasised in-between. Ideas of ‘organic’ and the concept of an organism are leveraged to negotiate the artist’s free-flowing subjects as they meander between the natural and virtual worlds. I consider how we create. What version of that exists in receiving a creation? What happens when this version of the work is then shared? Perhaps it is less a matter of what it becomes, or which parts of it survive, but rather who it connects and how. What do we add to the storm?

Upstairs, another creature lurks in the form of the artist’s video work Mother Tree (2021). Holding space in a dark, curtained nook, the abstractions, their colours and a breathy sibilation call for the audience’s undivided attention. “What emerges through colour and composition is a pretty, but putrefied, psychedelia,” the text continues to read, “a sense of nausea and repulsion, but also wonder and fascination. These works could be memento mori from a dystopian and dislocated future. Harbingers from the present. Relics from a disenchanted past.” Perhaps these colours allude to the altered states used to escape (or navigate) these truths and subsequent hardships. Perhaps the whorling plasma or poltergeist-likeness of the works inhabit a sense of disgust that allows the audiences to delve deeper into their own, discerning its true direction. What are we shaping and making through this convergence? What does it speak to? What future does it beckon for us?

In ‘Mineral Vegetal Digital,’ there is as much abstraction, distortion and loss as there is a sense of wonder, beauty and release. The cohabitation of natural and virtual symbols and their mutual mutations strike me as a time-stamp for the end to our distinction between these two entities, and an acceptance of their merging. 

Jonathan Silverman, Mother Tree, 2022. Image courtesy of Mia Thom.