| Comforting monsters BY SALLY ACHARYA Some children want to hug his art. Others take one look at the bright, fuzzy creatures with club feet and multiple eyes, and back out of the room. Adults have much the same reaction, in their more internalized ways: they’re charmed by it, or repelled by it, or both at once. Luis Silva, who chairs the art department at the College of Arts and Sciences, is a once-upon-a-time Harvard government major who took a course in painting, dropped his plans for law school, and for the last few years has been crafting “soft sculptures” that look like something a baby alien might take to its crib. They’re life-sized, sort of. While it would be hard to say how large a multi-eyed creature with giant pink feet would be in life, these creatures sometimes come up to Silva’s chest, and when installed in a gallery, they inhabit “worlds” filled with fabric flowers and sewn ivy and cushy red polka-dotted mushrooms. Give Hieronymus Bosch some antidepressants and a job on Sesame Street, and this is what the world of Elmo and Miss Piggy might look like. 
Luis Silva’s “lovely monsters” deal with the domestication of the unknown. 
Silva began making his “lovely monsters” as a reaction to his wife’s pregnancy. But it wasn’t precisely the prospect of a house filled with teddy bears that urged him to craft what are, in essence, giant stuffed animals. The creations emerged out of his fears. Would the child be healthy? Would his wife be all right? He had long been dealing artistically with notions of transformation and the intersection between the animate and inanimate. So when he looked at stuffed animals, he began to see the way that cultures take the fear of the unknown and domesticate it into a thing that can be hugged close. Bears and tigers, after all, are scary, fanged things. Barney is a six-foot dinosaur. Elmo is a hairy red monster with a very large mouth. Even real bunnies and mice are pests that bite. “We wind up taking these predatory animals, and we couch them in comfort,” he says. “It’s funny, this dualizing that exists between these animals we fear, and the way they function as a pacifier for other fears.” Silva’s creatures are as big-eyed as Japanese anime cartoons, and include flowers and other bright-colored details that read as “cute.” But they remain insistently monstrous with their mutations and deformities; even the flowers embedded in their skin have in part the appearance of an unwanted growth. His inspirations run the gamut from the cute to the disturbing: Pokemon, Frankenstein, medical deformities. They’re also elaborately and painstakingly sewn, which in itself is something of an achievement, since a few years ago, Silva barely knew how to thread a needle. Then, he says, “I wanted to make these animals, but the only way to make them soft would be to go into the tradition of sewing.” The challenge wasn’t intimidating. After all, Silva had been well along the path towards law school when he picked up a paintbrush for the first time and, shortly afterwards, decided to take his life in a direction he had never imagined before. “I think that kind of shapes how I think of art. You go where your interests take you,” he says. “Don’t be afraid to try the things you don’t know.” He’d been working in a variety of media—digital imaging, painting, video, installation—but this would be his first effort at soft sculpture. Fortunately, his mother was a seamstress, a Portuguese immigrant who, like his father, had made a living with her hands and could help him learn the basic skills. But after that, the needs of his art guided his learning—and, as it turned out, consumed much of his time.
 |
Luis Silva explores the relationship between media and reality in a video piece on display at the Katzen. |
Photos by Jeff Watts |
To do a piece about three feet long and two feet in diameter can take him three months, working six hours a day. “You start out with these ideas, and the first flower is exciting. The tenth is interesting. By the 100th, you’re starting to push it. By the 200th, it’s a job.” The creatures, complete with all those flowers, were displayed in a show this winter, Lovely Monsters, at G Fine Art. Will he continue to work on his soft sculptures? For the moment, he’s returning to video. One video piece, in which he recorded news footage taken in Afghanistan by a media pool and contextualized by different TV networks in slightly different ways, is on display in the current show of faculty art at the Katzen and speaks to the disconnect between reality and presentation. Silva’s work in various media has been exhibited recently at the WPA/Corcoran Museum, as well as galleries in Italy, Austria, Florida, New York, and Baltimore. The recipient of two Mellon Fund Research Grants, he is on the printmaking faculty and often teaches a graduate seminar in painting, critical theory, graduate drawing, and printmaking, as well as undergraduate and general education courses. Now, after several years of stitching his “lovely monsters,” he’s known for another skill, as well. “All of my friends,” he says, “call me to hem their pants.” |
