Catalogue > At random

The assignment was to make a gift for the artist Sol Lewitt (1927-2007). Legendarily generous to other artists, Lewitt exchanged works with anyone who sought him out, from famous peers to admirers who sent him unsolicited objects and images. Filmmaker Shelly Silver asked her close friend, writer Frances Richard, to collaborate by contributing text for a short film. The text chosen is a series of quotations from Lewitt?s close friend Eva Hesse (1936-1970): ?All order is ephemeral ? chaos eats into order ? yet it has its own order ? if order could be chaos, chaos can be structured as non-chaos.? On Mosco Street in New York City?s Chinatown, a not-quite fixed camera tracks the ephemeral order composed on a warm afternoon by a fence, some trees, a set of shadows, and the passage of pedestrians and traffic. The image is nearly monochrome though filmed without manipulation in broad daylight. Preoccupied with abstract propositions including the grid as a delineator of space and the modulation of light on unlike surfaces, the 6-minute film is also a mini-vérité, its extremely quiet chaos structured by ambient sound and tiny urban incident.

Frances Richard is the author of See and the chapbooks Anarch. and Shaved Code; a new volume of poems, The Phonemes, is forthcoming in 2011. In 2005, with Sina Najafi and Jeffrey Kastner, she co-curated the exhibition Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark?s ?Fake Estates"; a study of Matta-Clark?s language-use, currently in progress, has been supported by a grants from the Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital, the Canadian Centre for Architecture. She writes frequently about contemporary art, teaches at Barnard College and the Rhode Island School of Design, and lives in Brooklyn. Shelly Silver?s work, which spans a wide range of subject matter and genres, explores the personal and societal relations that connect and restrict us; the indirect routes of pleasure and desire; the stories that are told about us and the stories we construct about ourselves. Her work has been shown internationally at such venues as MoMA, MoCA, Yokohama Museum, Pompidou Center, London ICA, Museo Reina Sofia, and London, Singapore, New York, Moscow, and Berlin film festivals. She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, NYSCA, NYFA, the DAAD, Jerome Foundation, Japan Foundation and Anonymous was a Woman. She is an Associate Professor of Visual Arts in the School of the Arts, Columbia University.