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The Lamps

Shelly Silver

2015 00:04:14 United StatesEnglishColorStereo16:9HD video
Tags:
Animals, Art History, Feminism, LGBTQ, Poetry

Description

The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven né Plotz, was an unsung member of the Dada Movement. A poet, artist, runaway, and all around public provocateur; she actively did not fit into her historical moment, and like most misfits, suffered for it. As with many women artists throughout history, her cultural legacy has been obscured and in some instances appropriated into the oeuvres of better known male peers.

THE LAMPS details her trip to the Naples Archeological Museum in the early 1900’s where she breaks into 'Il Gabinetto Segretto,' a secret room filled with erotic objects from Pompeii.

The Baroness is not a futurist. She is the future. Marcel Duchamp

 

Quoting from the established genres of experimental, documentary, and fiction film and television, Shelly Silver’s work is funny, poetic and formally beautiful, seducing the viewer into pondering such difficult issues as the cracks in our most common assumptions, the impossibility of a shared language, and the ambivalent and yet overwhelming need to belong—to a family, a nation, a gender, an ideology. Exploring the psychology of public and private space, the ambivalence inherent in familial and societal relations and the seduction and repulsion of voyeurism, Silver’s work elicits equal amounts of pleasure and discomfort.