The Fantastical Reconstruction of the Epine GY7

MoCA Tucson

In 1948, in the icy waters off the west coast of Iceland, a British fishing trawler called the Epine GY7 wrecked. The remains of the ship washed up on a remote beach near the Snaefellsness Glacier. 

Silverstein documented and archived the three-dimensional fragments of this wreckage into graphic two-dimensional rubbings, which she brought back to her Los Angeles studio in order to create “fantastical reconstructions” of the ship.

Inherent in Silverstein’s practice is this same desire to take apart and piece back together fragments of her own work. Her studio overflows with stacks, piles, and arrangements of shapes cut from larger pieces of painted canvas which she arranges and rearranges into large-scale layered configurations. 

This project is also about failure—the epic failure that is a shipwreck is echoed by the secondary, certain failure to “reconstruct” the ship. For many reasons, the artist was always destined to fail at this monumental endeavor. But this frees the project from the obligation of objective reporting and favors what Werner Herzog would call “ecstatic truth.” Art as a response to knowing something is impossible.