Impulse, Pattern, and Power Dynamics
New York, NY, September 26, 2016 - Albertz Benda is pleased to present Ali Silverstein: To Put on the Edge, a Table, the Los Angeles-based artist’s first solo show in New York, on view in the project space from October 27 through December 17, 2016. For her inaugural exhibition at the gallery, Silverstein will show a vibrant new body of work that stems from her practice of gesture and reponse. Silverstein explores impulse and desire through a continuous process of painting, cutting, and layering canvas.
Silverstein has been mining the world of BDSM, utilizing the power dynamics of domination and submission in her creative process. Using the act of painting to address issues of vulnerability and shame, Silverstein’s ultimate goal is ever-expanding freedom - a legitimizing of desire and a searching-out of the places that we don’t allow ourselves to go.
Impulse, Pattern, and Power Dynamics
“The artist Ali Silverstein had never made the connection between her approach to painting and BDSM (bondage and discipline, domination and submission, Sadism and Masochism) before a discussion with a visitor to her solo booth at the untitled art fair in Miami Beach last year.
“‘I was talking about continually being present and feeling these genuine desires come up from a place that’s not in my mind, from a real body place, and then being brave enough to keep following those, and that’s when she [said] ‘This is exactly what I teach people,’’ Silverstein recalls. When she asked the visitor, Kasia Urbaniak, to elaborate, she replied, ‘Well, I’m the highest-paid dominatrix in the world,’ Silverstein says.
“‘The range of acceptable desires is very, very narrow,’ Silverstein says. ‘I think the easiest starting point is legitimizing desire — increasing the range of acceptable desires. Painting is a very immediate way to explore these things.’”
—Into the Frame: The Art of BDSM, The Art Newspaper November 14, 2016 on the occasion of To Put on the Edge, A Table at Albertz Benda Gallery, NYC