Silvia Levenson: I See You're A Bit Nervous

Silvia Levenson

2005

I See You’re a Bit Nervous

introduction

recipes for disaster

just desserts

food for thought

food for thought

1 chapter

i see you’re a bit nervous 2005, kiln-cast glass and mixed media 33 3/4 x 69 x 31 inches (table and chairs), 13.25 x 20 x 20 inches (lamp)

LOVING HANDS AT HOME silvia levenson and the politics of domesticity Love, Pain, Pardon, Resentment. This title, from one of Silvia Levenson’s recent installations about childhood, is disarming in its honesty. It does not have anything to do with what we are taught that we should feel, which is forgiveness. On the contrary, Levenson tells it like it really is. All of us, young and old, experience uncharitable feelings of seething resentment. It is not about being a man, a woman, or a child, but about being human, and it is human nature with which Levenson is concerned. Yet she is neither bitter nor scathing. There is hope, humor, and much happiness in Levenson’s world, in spite of the problems, and this is what makes her work so appealing.

it out) male-dominated “high” art. In her examination of family, traditionally the domain of the female, Levenson embraces glass, a craft-associated material, and an ultrafemme color, pink. Her radically feminized environment is reminiscent of Kim Dingle’s unforgettable icon of femininity: a pink MG convertible with brown fur interior, suggestive gear shift, and frilly white lace hubcaps, parked on a garage-sized white silk comforter (63MG 4ME, 1999).

Levenson’s pink kitchen is a world of ambivalence that swings from love to rebellion. A pink glass apron with prickly wires perfectly matches a pair of pink stiletto prickly glass shoes, titled I Love You, Honey (page 7). Outwardly neat and tranquil, the kitchen is wired with emotional land mines that are personified by objects. Functionless pink glass pots and pot holders, a checkered pink glass tablecloth edged in rusted razor blades, a pink glass overhead lamp fringed with razor blades, a pink glass bowl of pink glass hand grenades, and pink glass guns arranged in a first aid box. Are You Lonesome Tonight? (page 5), Levenson asks, employing the clichéd titles of Elvis Presley love songs.

The grenades and the guns are not out of place when we remember the arsenal of knives, cleavers, and shears that every well-stocked kitchen contains.

In her writings, Levenson talks about the “cannibalism” of feelings, how people can be eaten alive by their emotions.

In her art, she focuses on relationships, love, and the casual cruelties that we commit and then tend to make light of, ignore, or whitewash. Does violence begin at home?

What is the connection between love and hatred? Why do couples break up for seemingly trivial reasons? Why are we able to entertain murderous thoughts about the ones we love? What is the last straw?

My work is not about violence. The reality is that life is violent. My work is more about feelings than violence, the feelings before violence. For example, ”You look a little nervous, honey.” My work is about conflicting emotions – the woman who thinks about murder but never does it. These are very complicated emotions. – Silvia Levenson

In the video element of the installation, titled Something Wrong, a couple prepares dinner in an entirely pink kitchen.

This is a kitchen within a kitchen, a womb, a fecund hearth where the emotions rise along with the bread dough. The narrative begins with a woman, dressed in pink, returning from the market. She begins to prepare the breadsticks (i grissini), and she is soon joined by her man, whom she lovingly greets. They begin to work together and the hostilities begin (as they often will). The woman, attempting to bury her emotions, adds Prozac to the flour. They shape the grissini into words: the woman writes “love,” while the man tries to write “sweet.” Disagreement turns to fight for

I See You’re a Bit Nervous is a new installation that explores the topics of family, role, and identity with Levenson’s unique blend of sweetness, sublimated anger, honesty, and irony. Women’s work, such as cooking and crafts, is often sarcastically described as the product of “loving hands at home,” and it is considered the antithesis of (need I spell

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no particular reason, and the words, “something wrong,” fall to the floor.

Sometimes homes become small time bombs just waiting to explode. Safe from prying eyes, these soft nests are places where minor and serious acts of violence are committed every day. Normal daily life.

My work is about the tensions in everyday life. The objects I make are of small, household dimensions.

They are made of glass, a beautiful and dangerous material.

Levenson is at her most ironic when addressing general family dysfunction, as in her installation, Christmas with the Family, in which glass knives hang menacingly over a recliner in front of a television. The mine field of relationships is a recurrent theme in her work, and it appears in her earliest pieces in glass, where hearts are combined with scissors, knives, or prickly wire. Objects such as Cinderella, a cast glass pump with a nasty, thorn-like nail in the heel, or I Made It Myself (page 16), a white glass cake topped with Precious Moments-style “lovebirds” and decorated with razor blades and a paper doily, speak to women’s hopes for finding love and marriage.

Women’s fantasies about motherhood are unraveled in pieces such as Pride and Joy, in which a high chair is placed on a carpet of barbed wire littered with cast glass toys. A Little Darling is Born is sweeter and less ironic. This set of luminous glass baby clothes, charming and comical in their blocky shapes and soft pastel colors, refer to the sturdiness and fragility of babies and their need for protection.

Levenson’s glass clothes – for baby, child, or woman – act as vehicles for a range of emotions. Prickly-Girl (page 16) is a pinafore made of barbed wire, adorned with a large white and yellow flower, for a frustrated child. A sexy glass and razor blade woman’s sheath, titled Do You Like Me?, might be accompanied by a wire purse containing a meat

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cleaver (I Am a Lady, I Am) or a cotton net shopping bag stuffed with glass knives (I’ve Been Shopping).

moving works is Plaza de Mayo, in which glass knives hang over a large black and white photograph of two little girls (the artist and her sister), which has been transferred onto large squares of glass. The Plaza de Mayo, in Buenos Aires, is where Levenson and her sister played in the 1960’s and where they protested the junta in the 1970’s. In the 1980’s, mothers went to the square to look for family members who had disappeared during the dictatorship. The knives symbolize foreboding, bad events to come. Although this piece is autobiographical, the need to learn to live with fear is something that everyone can understand.

Levenson’s fashions have parallels in the work of artists such as Jana Sterbak, who made a wheeled crinoline skirt to be worn by one person, but driven by another via a remote control (Remote Control II, 1989) and a sleeveless, calf-length garment made entirely of sewn flank steaks (Vanitas: Meat Dress for an Albino Anorectic, 1987).

In a long-sleeved, floor-length dress made of wire mesh threaded with live, uninsulated wire, Sterbak makes her wishes plain in the title, which is I Want You to Feel the Way I Do (1984–1985). Levenson, however, is not openly hostile or sarcastic. Rather than being “cannibalized” by such feelings, she removes the emotion and replaces it with suggestion and symbol. Instead of pushing us away with aggression, her work draws us in with its grace.

I See You’re a Bit Nervous touches on a number of subjects, including relationships between women and men, women and family, clothing as metaphor, small, everyday rebellions, and the nature of home life. The installation is amusing in its drama and its pinkness but, characteristically for Levenson, it is also very serious. Domestic violence is not confined to a specific socio-economic class, ethnicity, or gender; even pretty young women and men in pink kitchens can become ensnared in its dark web. Using beauty and irony as a lure, Levenson coaxes us to acknowledge and work through uncomfortable thoughts and emotions, to look at them and resolve them before they eat us alive, before they turn into something out of our control.

I use knives and scissors in my work because they are ordinary, everyday objects that can suddenly become dangerous. For me, knives symbolize the possibility of violence, rather than violence itself.

Some of Levenson’s most evocative work is about childhood. In She Flew Away (page 16), an empty swing with a glass seat beckons. A pair of glass child’s shoes, placed beneath the swing, is a symbol that Levenson uses to denote children or childhood. The excitement of speed and movement, at once free, joyous, and terror-filled, is implied in this sculpture, as is the child’s fantasy of hurtling off a swing into flight.

Tina Oldknow CURATOR OF MODERN GLASS Corning Museum of Glass Corning, New York August 2005

Flight can also be negative, as in fleeing from something.

Levenson, her husband, and their young children escaped from Argentina to Italy during the traumatic years of Jorge Rafaél Videla’s military dictatorship. In leaving her country of origin, Levenson left her past behind, and her activity of materializing childhood memories is a way of rebuilding a period of her life that was lost to her. One of her most

previous page: video stills from installation for I See You’re a Bit Nervous Silvia Levenson and Natalia Saurin, Something Wrong, 2005, DVD

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chapter

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selected works

recipes for disaster just desserts

recipes for disaster

Houses are cosy milieux that often turn into small emotional time bombs.

It is exactly the most familiar people who can become alien; family members who turn into enemies, houses that turn into battlefields.

Without camouflage, without any training, within this rarefied environment, people go to war...

2005

are you lonesome tonight?

2005, kiln-cast glass and mixed media, 16 1/4 x 12 x 2 7/8 inches

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it hurts me 2005, kiln-cast glass and mixed media, 23 x 16 x 6 inches

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i love you, honey 2005, kiln-cast glass and mixed media, 4 x 5 x 7 1/4 inches each shoe

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i will protect you 2005, kiln-cast glass, 13 3/8 x 32 1/2 x 7/8 inches installed

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any way you want me 2005, kiln-cast glass, 12 7/8 x 30 x 5/8 inches installed

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love me 2005, kiln-cast glass and mixed media, 36 x 20 x 2 1/2 inches

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always on my mind 2005, blown and cold-worked glass, 12 1/2 x 42 x 9 inches installed

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good morning! good evening 2005, kiln-cast glass, mixed media, 5 1/2 x 5 x 3 inches (left) 7 x 6 x 3 1/2 inches (right)

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something wrong 2005, kiln-cast glass and pressed glass, 4 x 6 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches

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besame mucho 2005, kiln-cast glass, 6 1/8 x 10 1/2 x 1 5/8 inches

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chapter

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congratulations, credentials, and credits

just desserts

just desserts

pink curtain 2005, mixed media, 78 x 36 x 3/4 inches

CIN CIN! In a medium condemned to forever swim upstream against its own beauty, Silvia Levenson throws us a Life Saver. We can grab on and enjoy the sometimes painful ride or we can look away. After all, who can fault beauty? It’s certainly no crime to love yummy color and gem-like surface. But it’s also healthy to look beneath that surface and see what else the material has to offer.

Levenson has been giving us an outsider’s peek at glass – and a lot more – for over a decade. For those of us who are deep into the vitreous goo, we deserve this. And we need it. Her earlier refugee views, the razor-edged perspectives on fashion, and the bitter-sweet reflections on childhood have all been delivered with just a soupçon of humor – enough irony to make the medicine go down.

We deserve this. And Silvia Levenson deserves the recognition that is coming to her at last: her winning of the prestigious Rakow Commission from the Corning Museum of Glass in 2004 is a key indicator, not only of her own career, but of the maturation of a material that is more than just a pretty face.

Silvia, Salute!

Lani McGregor EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR The Bullseye Connection Portland, Oregon October 2005 clockwise from top left: It’s Raining Knives, 1996 - 2004 (19th Rakow Commission), cast glass and mixed media, 47 1/4 x 51 1/8 x 47 1/4 inches E’ Volata Via, (She Flew Away), 2000, cast glass, 118 x 17 x 9 inches I Made It Myself, 1998, cast glass, razor blades, mixed media, 9 7/8 x 14 1/2 x 14 1/2 inches Prickly-Girl, 2000, cast glass and barbed wire, 27 1/2 x 23 5/8 x 23 5/8 inches

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SILVIA LEVENSON Born Currently

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1957, emigrated to Italy, 1981 Independent studio artist, Lesa, Lago Maggiore, Italy

Education 1994 Casting workshop with Vincent van Ginneke, Musée-Atelier du Verre de Sars-Poteries, France 1991 Pâte de verre workshop with Antoine Leperlier, Musée-Atelier du Verre de Sars-Poteries, France 1990 Architectural glass workshop with Liz Mapelli, Zurich, Switzerland 1987 Kilnformed glass workshop, Creative Glass, Zurich, Switzerland 1977 Martin Garcia School of Graphic Design, Buenos Aires, Argentina (1973-77) Selected Collections Bullseye Glass Co., Portland, OR Casa de las Americas Collection, Havana, Cuba Comune di Castelvetro, Castelvetro (Modena) Italy Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY Ernesting Glass Collection, Coefeld, Germany Glasmuseum, Ebeltoft, Denmark Glas Museum Frauenau, Germany Musée-Atelier du Verre de Sars-Poteries, France Museo del Vetro, Altare, Italy Museo Leon Rigaulleau, Buenos Aires, Argentina Selected Awards 2004 Rakow Commission award recipient, Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY

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© 2005 Bullseye Glass Co.

PUBLISHED BY Bullseye Glass Co. 3722 SE 21st Avenue, Portland, OR 97202

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For inquiries about the artist or works shown, please contact:

Special thanks from the artist to:

The Bullseye Connection Gallery 300 NW 13th Avenue, Portland, OR 97209 USA

Natalia & Emiliano Alessandra Piazza Studio Corning’s assistants Lorena Saurin Francesca Grilli Nicole Leaper Jeff Phegley Tina Oldknow Lani & Daniel Catalog design research by; Kay Crawford Tanya Harrison Page 16 images courtesy of: Caterina Tognon

T 503-227-0222 F 503-227-0008 E gallery@bullseyeglass.com DESIGN Nicole Leaper PRODUCTION Jerry Sayer PHOTOGRAPHY all images (except where noted) Ryan Watson page 3 Umberto Nicoletti page 16 Cristiano Vassalli page 18 Natalia Saurin

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