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Things I Forget To Tell Myself

Shelly Silver

1989 00:02:00 United StatesEnglishMono4:3Video
Tags:
City

Description

A fragmented view of a city provides this poetic examination of disclosing and withholding—what is and isn’t seen, and once it is seen, how is it read?

“In New York artist Shelly Silver’s Things I Forget to Tell Myself, a fragmented textual statement… is interspersed with imagery culled from NYC, much of it cropped by the camera operator’s outstretched hand. Buildings, windows, signs, pedestrians, cops, and doors constitute a continuum of access and obstruction. The sometimes alternating, sometimes simultaneous patterns of disclosure and withholding, recognition and inobservance, are scrutinized to reveal the imprints of psychological processes and cultural codes, while testing boundaries between seeing and reading.”

—Michael Nash, Channels for A Changing TV (Long Beach Museum of Art, 1991)

Quoting from the established genres of experimental, documentary, and fiction film and television, Shelly Silver’s work is funny, poetic and formally beautiful, seducing the viewer into pondering such difficult issues as the cracks in our most common assumptions, the impossibility of a shared language, and the ambivalent and yet overwhelming need to belong—to a family, a nation, a gender, an ideology. Exploring the psychology of public and private space, the ambivalence inherent in familial and societal relations and the seduction and repulsion of voyeurism, Silver’s work elicits equal amounts of pleasure and discomfort.

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