December 16 - February 3, 2024
Reception: December 16, 4 - 6pm
Artist Talk: January 20, 11am
Diane Silver’s work had its first appearance at Craig Krull Gallery in the 2021 group exhibition of nine LA women entitled, of rope and chain her bones are made.
This exhibition brought together work that evidenced the hand through the use of elemental materials, dichotomies of strength and fragility, as well as palpable manifestations of energy. These artists employed tactile and raw materials in repetitive acts and rhythmic processes that resulted in patterned, arterial forms in the tradition of Eva Hesse and Ruth Asawa. Silver presents her latest work in this vein in her new exhibition, Horizontal Shift. Beginning with large sheets of linen, she dyes the material with indigo, creating imperfect, organic flows of blue against areas of untouched natural tones of the fabric. These expansive textiles float on the wall and are knotted and twisted with silver leaf, steel wool, or other fibrous materials sewn into the surfaces. The work is entirely abstract, but horizontal bands of pulled and stitched cloth might suggest the ocean, while the patchy undyed areas appear as clouds and sky. As Silver states, her “repetitive motifs and forms echo the seriality of Minimalism” but, like Hesse, her use of more fluid contours diverge from the hard-edged approach of that genre, aligning more with feminist contexts.