Ernest Silva at San Diego State University – Thursday, April 16 at 4:00 p.m.
Visiting artist Ernest Silva will present an illustrated lecture on Thursday, April 16 at 4:00 p.m. in Room 412 of SDSU’s School of Art, Design and Art History in conjunction with the exhibition animalkind. The lecture and exhibition are FREE and OPEN to the PUBLIC. The exhibition continues at the Gallery through May 6.
About the Artist Since the early-1970s, Ernest Silva’s work has been exhibited in over 45 solo exhibitions across the United States and Europe. He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Made in California at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Silva has been a professor of art at the University of California, San Diego since 1979. In addition to his career as an artist and educator, Silva is responsible for co-creating the bi-national project InSite, which has comprised commissioned artworks exhibited throughout the San Diego and Tijuana regions since its inception in 1992. Silva’s work was first seen at the University Art Gallery in 1978 in the exhibition Drawing: Personal Definitions. It is a pleasure to welcome him and his work back to San Diego State University for animalkind.
About the Work Four of Ernest Silva’s paintings are included in “animalkind.” In one of these, a solitary buck seems alarmingly unaware of the devastation that surrounds him. He stands calmly at the edge of a stream flanked by a leafless forest filled with large stumps and severed trees, oblivious to the potential dangers inherent in the lack of sylvan cover and the loss of habitat. Nor does he notice that the entire landscape-sky, water and shore-appears either punctured by bleeding bullet holes or polluted with pools of dripping black oil. The unseen perpetrator of the destruction is the human species, which, according to Silva’s painting, has painted a symbolic bull’s eye on both the deer and nature as a whole. At the same time, the central isolated figure in this and other of Silva’s deer paintings acts as a metaphor for the human condition, especially the state of being vulnerable and alone.
Image: Ernest Silva, “Between Two Shadows, Deer on a Raft,” 2001; oil on canvas, 31 x 39 inches; courtesy of the artist
