This series of soup bowl-set sculptures displays a panoply of urban woes. Silverman’s Soups seat the viewer in a position of omniscience relative to miniature figurines that float, apparently oblivious to their predicament, suspended in broth amidst facsimile vegetables ready to be devoured. Cherubs smiling in their sleep, benevolent doctors, and hobo clowns : it is unclear whether these factory produced character figures are reflections of life or garish figments of a fantasized generic public. The uneasy sway between the two is compounded by the tension between the twinned apocalypses evoked by the image of these miniature flooded worlds, the Biblical flood mythologized as a purification of wrong choice and the imminent threat of catastrophic climate shift brought on by human error.
Control, 2016Pig feed trough, wire, polyester stuffing, string lights, torch light, selenite, rabbi figurine22 x 30 x 18 in