2023 MFA Thesis Exhibition

bathtime with Finn: afk/ok, 2023, 2-channel video, 3:05 min

'third space' studies in liminality: virtual spaces and abstract places, 2022, 3-part Video Collage, 5:04 min

Michelle Silva’s work warps and abstracts from reality. She uses time as a reflection of memory and motif as a rendering of space, speaking to her experiences growing up in a digitally-obsessed generation, while reflecting on the social ramifications of modern (mid-century) and contemporary visual culture. Her work uses the messiness of digital intervention and discombobulation — looking at Legacy Russell’s Glitch — to connect with other cyborg bodies by exploring relevant automatic systems, ranging from the Horn and Hardart Automat to AI generators to stylized user interfaces and more as form. 

Through world-building techniques, Michelle refocuses the ‘American Dream’ outside of the military-industrial complex, citing Mark Fischer’s Capitalist Realism as the premises of many interventions. As the speed at which technology increases, so does the pace at which society evolves, adapts, changes— grows. Her work grasps at these fleeting moments of evolution, looking at moments of self-growth in relation to these technologies. In this way, space and time are both at the will of the viewer and the maker independently. 

Michelle Silva (she/her) is an interdisciplinary, New York based artist, working at the intersection of new and traditional media. Growing up on the internet, she has learned to use ‘avatars’ as representations of the self that are both real and unreal, physical and non-physical, and able to cushion the harshness of the real world —a metaphysical pseudo- self, a mask (in the Neurodivergent sense, but also in the Traditional sense), and a bridge to the unobtainable. Through the avatar, acting as stand-in for the physical body, Michelle is able to find a sense of her Jewish-American, Neurodivergent, and Queer identities.