Ali Silverstein - And/And

And/And is the opposite of Either/Or; it is a space of confluence, contact and relationship, of edges and seams and questionable boundaries between seemingly solid things. And/And also refers to the dynamic created by putting together, in this show, works of different size and media. The watercolours on paper, drawings, cuttings and large-scale acrylic paintings on canvas all show a consistency of vision, a continuity of meditation.

Steered by the Buddhist notions of impermanence and interconnectedness, the subject of Silverstein?s work is the observation itself ? a discipline of observation that devises strategies to see things in terms of the unnamable (but not necessarily unrecognizable) places where a thing is not quite contained within its own definition. This inability to name (even if there is some sense of recognition) is in a way a recreation of that first state of coming into the world, of seeing a thing for the first time.

Describing one of her methods, she has said, ?I started making the blind watercolours of still lives purely as a discipline, as a practice of viewing intimately and presently. Without aesthetic concern and without looking at the paper, I try to simply record what I see, to trace the being-there as I look. I try to keep recognition at bay, and to allow my hand to record this.?

Also included in the show are the double ?blind? observations: two observations of an object - one in pencil and one with a knife. In both, the effort is to record form and line only, with irreverence for the boundaries that enclose a thing and allow us to define it. The two drawings, one overlapping the other, show how an object changes in observation from moment to moment. The work asks how can we define a thing if its boundary (definition) is not closed?

Ali Silverstein was born in 1980. She studied eastern religions at Columbia University in New York and graduated with an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art in London. In 2004 she exhibited with BISCHOFF/WEISS during Scope London and Scope Miami. In 2005 she participated in different group shows such as ?Augnablik? at the Govett-Kerr space and ?Sine Qua Non? at BISCHOFF/WEISS. In addition to this show, she will be the main artist exhibited by BISCHOFF/WEISS this December at Scope Miami during Art Basel South Beach.