Shelly Silver is a renowned artist who has been making films for nearly thirty years, working at the intersection of documentary, fiction, video art, and experimental film. Her moving-image works often examine different subject positions and kinds of storytelling, the contradictory nature of memories, and the tensions between real and constructed, individual actions, and collective responsibility. In her debut docu-fiction Meet the People (1986), which is set squarely in the “Morning in America” Reagan era, Silver explores the vibration between how identity is constructed or projected, especially when a camera is involved, and our idea about the true and the false. Many of her later films are also examinations of place, intimacy, and boundaries, putting emphasis on the diversity and complexity of the (personal, sensual, physical, social) fabric in, and with which, we live. In the works featured in this special screening, Silver sustains the ambiguity of the real while deconstructing prevailing patriarchal representations that perpetuate existing ways of seeing, as well as exposes the inevitably political character of the practice of filmmaking itself.
Shelly Silver
Studios
Mixter
Shelly Silver worked in the Mixter studio.
Built in 1927–1930, the Florence Kilpatrick Mixter Studio was funded by its namesake and designed by the architect F. Winsor, Jr., who also designed MacDowell's original Savidge Library in 1925. Mixter Studio, solidly built of yellow and grey-hued granite, once had sweeping views of Pack Monadnock to the east. The lush forest has now grown…