Jeanne Silverthorne: They Will Be Like Shadows
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is excited to announce Jeanne Silverthorne’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. They Will Be Like Shadows delves into her enduring preoccupation with the corporeal and the elusive self—a fragmented presence that navigates the studio as much as the wider world. Her sculptures embody a spectrum of existence, from the purity of infancy to the shadows of old age, intertwining traces of the grotesque and the tender. This tension finds resonance in the exhibition’s literary epigraphs: Clarice Lispector’s ethereal “And the unfathomable night of dreams began, vast, levitating,” and Angela Carter’s haunting “She herself is a haunted house. Her ancestors... come and peer out of the windows of her eyes.”
While alluding to her own family history, Silverthorne’s works remain rooted in her decades-long inquiry into the studio as a site of labor, creation, and existential reckoning. Familiar objects—bubble wrap, packing tape, two-by-fours, crates, hammers, and dollies—become uncanny relics, meticulously cast in rubber, the material central to her practice since the mid-1980s. These familiar objects, transformed into uncanny relics, invite a meditation on the boundaries between the material and the metaphysical, where labor, creation, and memory intertwine.

























