Distortion Society show addresses dilemma
Michelle Silver gets physical when she paints, cranking up the tunes to sing and dance with abandon. Sometimes, she slows down to focus on details while caking oil on canvases and linen backgrounds like frosting.
Her latest solo show, What She Builds, She Must Destroy, at Distortion Society in Beacon (which she co-owns with her husband, Bradley), features extreme abstractions that began life as figurative iterations. Most of them are now smudged beyond recognition, but stare at the menacing maelstrom long enough and maybe an unintended face emerges (“In the Belly of the Beast”). Perhaps “A Thousand Words” becomes a beach scene as the sun glows in the top left corner.
In “Holding Pattern,” based on a candid photo taken when Silver began going into labor with her second child, the facial expression reads, “Let’s do this.”
The work “What She Builds, She Must Destroy” depicts a naked figure lying on her back, surrounded by an inky black cloud, a pose that references the acts of creating a child and delivering a baby.
Raising two sons, now 7 and 3, forced Silver to become more productive in her Philipstown home studio because, when she sets up to paint, “I might only have two hours that I have to maximize, so there’s less time to dwell and overthink things,” she says.
On the flip side of parenthood for her, “it’s already hard to make a living with art, and doing so while parenting young kids is very challenging.”
Many of the frames at the show explore “the contradictions inherent in motherhood: the tension between creation and destruction, restriction and permission, duty and desire,” she writes in the program.
“My style is strident and over-the-top on purpose,” she says. The harsh strokes swarming on the canvas or linen surfaces generate a tempest of tension and emotion. Sometimes Silver wields a brush, but her primary tool is a silicone spatcher blade.
Dominant motifs center on splashes of menacing reds softened and contrasted with splotches of lighter colors and others hardened by darker streaks. It only looks like she used a trowel to separate the overlapping layers of colors with stepped edges. From afar, the swirls in “Concentration of Energy” resemble a finger painting.
The show is a manifesto trumpeting her “power and right to do what I want with my life and my art,” she says. One aim is to “destroy the idea that mothers must subsume their identities and pour their entire beings into caring for their children while neglecting themselves.”
Silver, 38, rebels against defined roles and narrow lanes. “We’re seen as martyrs dedicating our lives to the children,” she says. “But we’re multifaceted human beings who make mistakes but also do wonderful things, like kissing boo-boos.”
Then comes the inevitable as kids grow up. “This is the wildest journey, I love it so much, but it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done by far,” she says. “After all of that, now I can see with my oldest that the snuggle times are dwindling, and it’s sad to think, ‘Oh no, that’s it for him.’ ”
Distortion Society, at 155 Main St. in Beacon, is open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday to Friday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. See distortionsociety.com or call 845-202-0680. What She Builds, She Must Destroy continues through Aug. 10.
