LOS ANGELES — Susan Silton’s four-decade retrospective at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery documents her multifaceted investigations into queerness, illness, the environment, and the politics that surround these topics. As a conceptual artist, she works in multiple media, including prints, photography, video, installation, and performance. Focused on inclusivity and community engagement, her projects are often collaborative and participatory.
Silton was already an established graphic designer when she produced the political print “Target” (1991), which superimposes labels denoting gender, nationality, and sexual orientation onto an image of a man with a target on his back. Critical of a culture that reduces people to identity categories rather than recognizing their shared humanity, Silton later created an innovative series of self-portraits by moving her face across an active scanner. In “Self Portrait #4” (1995), she distorted her physiognomy to resemble a malleable substance, a metaphor for her belief that queerness is only one of many aspects of a person’s identity, and that it can be fluid. In a related move, she scanned and manipulated images of early 20th-century bird illustrations to create the series Aviate (1998-2000), resulting in sublime, colorful, linear abstractions that symbolize birds flying freely, no longer defined solely by their behavior or physical characteristics.
