Susan Silton

We can have perception problems—we don't understand a situation. There are two basic reactions to this: one is to reduce our movements, to stop, to hesitate in order to reorganize the flow of sets, and the other is to speed up, to intensify the movements in order to reach an order through the performative power of the movement itself.

— Achim Wollscheid
The Terrorized Term

The universe is spinning in a pointless vortex. Man, too, for all his little objective world, is spinning in the limbo of the pointless.

—Kasimir Malevich

Over the course of several months in 2000, I took my video camera to various locations in Los Angeles and New York and, as if the camera were an appendage, spun around in circles while recording the impaired view. The camera was held—lens pointed outward—at eye level and at arm‘s length, in my line of sight, as it were. The performative activity was simultaneously destabilizing and intoxicating. Coming out of each spin I would stumble, and sometimes fall like a giddy child, the disruption of my balance a palpable reminder of how the body responds physiologically to activities it is not intended to perform. The camera, meanwhile—an extension of my body but not of it—documented what I “saw” given that my eyes could not function normally under such circumstances or make visual sense of what lay in front of me.

The resulting piece is titled hemidemisemiquaver , a term that refers, in musicology, to a very fast and fleeting 1/64 th note. Ironically, it is the audio component of the piece—collected at each location I spun—, which presents the only linear aspect of the work. All of the actions were edited together to form an approximately 30-minute loop; the piece was originally installed on a monitor at the end of a sculptural tunnel, the dimensionality of which reflected the dynamic experience of my movement in space. It has, in other installations such as at SITE Santa Fe, been exhibited as a floor to ceiling projection, which effectively brings my body closer to the viewer's, and as a result more acutely impacts the viewer's own equilibrium.

Hemidemisemiquaver speaks, on one level, to the human desire to alter one's physical and/or mental reality—to lose a measure of control—both to reconfigure one's presumptions and to either intensify or simply tweak one's sensations. It is my intention in much of my work to activate the ambiguous, uncomfortable, and sometimes exhilarating space of the in-between, an intention readily apparent in the piece: between clarity and disorientation, abstraction and representation, motion and stasis, truth and fiction, presence and absence. From this tenuous site of the interstitial, I seek to challenge or redirect our impulse to control or categorize nature (topographical and human) as we perceive it, and even to challenge or redirect perception itself.

Susan Silton is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work is supported through diverse media, including photographic-based processes, video, installation, and offset lithography. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including Feigen Contemporary, New York; SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico; Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; Angles Gallery, Santa Monica; New Orleans Contemporary Art Museum; UCLA/Hammer Museum; and Allianz Zeigniederlassung, Berlin, Germany. Her work was recently included in Picturing Modernity: The Photography Collection, SFMOMA; and in the exhibitions New Acquisitions/New Work/New Directions 3: Contemporary Selections, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, and Selections from the Permanent Collection II: American Art on Paper from the 1960s to the Present, Washington University Art Gallery, St. Louis, Missouri. Silton has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada, as well as awards and commissions from the Durfee Foundation and Clockshop Foundation. She is a recipient of a Getty/California Community Foundation Fellowship in 2005, as well as a C.O.L.A. Individual Artist Fellowship in 2003. Her work is most recently published in Cabinet magazine.