Susan Silton

Published with Blaffer Art Museum.

Comprising participatory and multimedia installations, photographic, video and audio works, early graphic pieces and textual interventions, this catalog is published to accompany the first major survey exhibition for the Los Angeles–based artist Susan Silton (born 1956). Taking its title from a 1972 poem by Adrienne Rich, a poet and essayist active in feminist and lesbian literary circles, Diving into the Wreck reveals Silton's layered practice as one that amplifies the possibilities and limits of text, vision, perception and participation in social and political becoming. Newly commissioned art historical essays coupled with new and reprinted literary texts ask a reader to examine the "wreck" of their internal and external worlds in the hopes that better paths might be imagined for a collective future. Silton's work illustrates that the message is never settled—rather, it twists and mutates.