Steve Silber, January 2007

            I define my life by what it can be; not simply by what it presently appears to be.   I approach my work in a similar fashion.   For me, moments of inspiration are most gratifying.   I love a notion, a fleeting moment of epiphany.   When a notion works it becomes an idea.   When a series of ideas are grouped together, they can become a concept.   When the concept is layered between the past, present, future, social, physical, and metaphysical, it becomes a story – no, more than a story – it becomes ritual.

            Searching for a collective conscious, I unravel common threads in our existence, looking to history for a lineage pointing towards the future.   I am interested in the certain way an individual may gaze upon the world and I aspire to provide more obtuse perceptions.   As artists our unique quandary is to not only answer questions and solve problems; we first must create the questions and problems we wish to solve.   How do I encourage pause and wonder?   How does one go about creating work that is original, inspiring, believable, magic, and authentic?   The answer: to reflect and experiment, to author something both particular and accessible; simultaneously containing an elusive epic moment, and the fodder of an initiation point eliciting conversation.   Therefore, my process concentrates more on the question than the answer.   For it is within a series of questions that the answers I search for lie.    A question is open to possibilities; an answer is finite.   Visual art is not linear, nor is it an objective to obtain, but a thought to more completely understand.   Investigating in this way, I can look at my work as though I had never seen it before, no actually I am looking as though I had never seen before at all.

Perception is often dictated by cause and effect relationships and their control mechanisms, something I often grapple with.   I consider the effect a work will have on mood, social dynamics, and general activity in relation to the space.  Aesthetically, I am specific and intuitive.   I am drawn towards visualization of physical relationships and find myself attracted to forms that I can completely understand.   In such a confusing universe, there is something satisfying about a perfect shape or curve and a solid known color.   But, sometimes my work becomes impacted, and occasionally thereby limited, by what can be made with clean smooth lines.   Recently, I have begun with a precisely measured structure and, acknowledging the inevitability of change, I use materials or dynamics that cannot possibly follow the same ordered fashion of my exacting nature.   In this way I connect perceived archetypes with dirty truths.

            Addicted to counterpoints, I have found I do best in environments dedicated to experimentation and intellectual research, as well as material expertise.   I bring both rich experience and varied perspectives; and my obsession for learning makes me committed to listening and participating, growing and sharing.   I am a searcher.   I search for history, for the future, for the present.   I study through the microscope, then retreat to the mountaintop to gain a new view.   I take the seemingly ordinary and invert its expectations to make the extraordinary, intensifying by reduction and expanding with illusion.