Gallery for New Media

Since the early 1980s, Amy Sillman has been creating mercurial drawings, paintings, and moving images that draw the viewer’s attention to the formal, psychological, and conceptual capacities of her materials. This exhibition presents the artist’s recent work After Metamorphoses—an “animated drawing” based on the Roman poet Ovid’s fifteen-book epic Metamorphoses, which chronicles the creation of the world and its early history through a series of mythological transformations. Sillman was drawn to the parallels between the classical text, which engages themes of love, cruelty, and power, and the current social and political climate. Conceived in 2014 during a residency at the American Academy in Rome, the work is composed of abstract drawings the artist made in a bathtub in a small studio apartment in Berlin that she then layered beneath sketches animated with an iPad. Precisely following the sequence of changes that occur in Ovid’s narrative, Sillman further imbued the story with performativity and humor. A variegated background flashes as fantastical characters undergo strange and often-comical mutations in rhythm with the work’s original score. In After Metamorphoses, Sillman unites the painterly process with digital technology in an exploration of continual change and the alterability of all things.

After Metamorphoses was commissioned by The Drawing Center in New York and premiered in its Lab Gallery in January 2017. 

This exhibition is organized by Godin-Spaulding Curator & Curator for the Collection Holly E. Hughes.

Admission to this exhibition is free during M&T FIRST FRIDAYS @ THE GALLERY.