print   back Shelly Silver Biography - long In Shelly Silver's enigmatic narratives of contemporary identity, truth and fiction are constantly in doubt, the veracity of what is seen and what is not seen is questioned, and the modes by which information is disclosed, withheld and mediated hold meaning. Appropriating the structures and codes of television and cinema narratives, Silver relies on the viewer's complicity -- the expectation of how media stories are "read," the desire to believe and identify with their conventions and characters. Blurring authenticity and falseness, artifice and reality ('real' compared to what), Silver often merges stylized black-and-white film with color video, fragmented images with written text and sound, elements of documentary and melodrama with comedy. From the elusive Things I Forget to Tell Myself (1989) to the multi-leveled melodrama of The Houses That Are Left (1991), her fragmented narratives are steeped in ironic inquiry. References to broadcast advertising and television formats are informed by Silver's experience as a commercial video editor. Investigating how contemporary identity is both reflected and constructed by television and cinema, Silver questions storytelling, role-playing and the means by which popular narratives articulate fictions of the self. In the 1990's, Silver lived for extended periods outside of the United States. Her experiences as an "outside observer" in Germany, France, and Japan have led to works in which she questions the myths and realities of cultural and national identity. Interweaving of documentary, essay, and story-telling techniques in works such as Former East/Former West (1994) and 37 Stories About Leaving Home (1996), Silver explores how we negotiate cultural narratives to arrive at definitions of the self. Her most recent work, the upcoming feature-length fiction suicide (2003) follows a woman's strange intercontinental voyage, chronicling her fiercely hopeful and desperate search for a reason to continue living. Shot in the genre of a personal journal film, and starring Silver herself as the fictional filmmaker heroine, suicide is an audacious act of flirting with the revelatory autobiographical. As the heroine slips ever further into the shadow areas between the real and the imagined, she narrates the films two voyages, her own as well as a Quixote-like tale of a Princess and her...penis. Shelly Silver was born in 1957 in Brooklyn, NY. She received a B.A. (Phi Beta Kappa) in History and a B.F.A. in Mixed Media from Cornell University. She subsequently attended the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. She has been exhibited throughout the US, Europe and Asia at venues such as MoMA, NYC, MoCA, LA, The Pompidou Center, Paris; The Kyoto Museum, Japan, The ICA London, The London Film Festival, The Singapore Film Festival and has won many awards including at The Leipzig International Documentary Festival, The Australian Int'l Film & Video Festival and The Houston Int'l Film Festival. Silver has received fellowships and grants from the NEA, the DAAD, NYSCA, NYFA, the Jerome Foundation and Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation. She is a 2005 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. Silver currently lives in New York where she teaches at The Cooper Union and the MFA Program of Photography and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts. She is an organizer of Nomads & Residents, a group of artists, organizers and curators involved in organizing informal evening events around contemporary issues: www.nomadsresidents.org page top