Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, Silvia Levenson immigrated to Italy in 1981, during the “disappearances” of the Dirty War. In 2004, Levenson received the Rakow Commission Award from the Corning Museum of Glass in 2008 she was a shortlisted nominee for the Bombay Sapphire Prize and in 2016 she received The Glass in Venice Award from Istituto Veneto, Venice, Italy.
I explore daily interpersonal relationships through installations and objects that state firmly what is usually felt or whispered. My work is centralized on this unspeakable space, which is oftentimes so small, located between what we can see and what we feel. I use glass to reveal those things that are normally hidden.
I believe that there are no neutral materials; in my work I mainly use glass because I am fascinated by its ambiquity. It is a material that we all know well because it protects and isolates our homes, we use it to preserve our foods and beverages but in some ways we also know that it is fragile, that it can break into thousands of tiny pieces and hurt us. For my work it becomes the ideal material to show the ambiguity of human relationships and of the things that exist but that hide behind the thousand folds of what we call reality.
Furthermore, as Tina Olkdown noted, “women’s works, such as cooking and crafts, is often sarcastically described as product of “loving hands at home” and it is considered the antithesis of male-dominated “high art”. I use a very traditional, hand-crafted material to describe not what we put on top of our furniture but what we carefully hide under our rugs.
