The Los Angeles and Santa Fe studios of artist Ali Silverstein are dynamic spaces of collision and connection. On any given afternoon, you might find her in a choreography of cutting, dragging, repositioning, crawling over, or layering large painted canvases across the floor.

Silverstein’s practice is rooted in the belief that things transform through contact. Her work documents what happens at the moment of touch—where discrete elements collide and generate hybrid forms. This transformation is rarely complete or fully knowable; much like human relationships, it is partial, fluid, and often obscured. Flaps, fringes, and full overlays of canvas or veils of paint operate like metaphors for desire, denial, intimacy, and the limits of perception. “I want to see and understand everything,” she says, “but I know we can only ever access fragments—glimpses through veils.”

Born in Los Angeles in 1980, Silverstein earned her BA in Comparative Religion and Visual Art from Columbia University and then moved to London to study painting at the Slade School of Art. Her background in religion infuses her work with a fascination for the many ways people make sense of existence. “Whether austere or psychedelically complex, many different stories can be crafted from the same evidence,” she notes.

Before completing her MFA, she became one of the inaugural advisors for the Outset Contemporary Art Fund, and after graduation, she was represented by Bischoff Weiss Gallery in London. Since then, her work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group shows, commissioned for large-scale public and private spaces, and featured in major collections worldwide. She has contributed writing to The New York Times, directed an award-winning documentary, and reconstructed an entire Icelandic shipwreck for a solo show at MoCA Tucson. She is self-represented.

Across media, Silverstein’s method remains consistent: she encourages reactive events between elements, treating the studio as both laboratory and stage. Through strategies of layering, obscuration, and interaction, her work reveals that meaning is not fixed but endlessly resurrected—forever shifting, like a kaleidoscope, with each new combination.