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.

The exhibition unfolds as a fragmented narrative that resists resolution. A sleeping infant rests atop a vast white cloud (And the Unfathomable Night of Dreams Began); a diminutive portrait of Silverthorne’s mother stands on a book (Mom on Book) or beneath an overhanging cloud (Mom Under a Cloud II); a miniature figure of a studio worker, hammer in hand, pauses in mid-motion (End of Day); and a deflated, life-sized likeness of the artist herself stretches across the floor (Banshee). These sculptures evoke a sense of intimate vulnerability while gesturing toward broader existential themes. Silverthorne’s sparse literary allusions and three-dimensional punctuation marks underscore the enigmatic quality of her work, weaving together memory, labor, and selfhood.

Rendered in a muted palette of gray, black, cream, and titanium buff, the works shift tonally from brooding meditations on mortality, to moments of absurdity, doubling, and shifts in scale, to serene depictions of unguarded innocence. The subdued colors act as a unifying thread, while their emotional resonance oscillates between humor and melancholy, evoking a world where contradictions coexist in delicate equilibrium.

Jeanne Silverthorne holds a BA and MA from Temple University. Her one-person museum exhibitions include the Phillips Collection, Whitney Museum of Art, P.S.1, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and the University of Kentucky Museum, as well as galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Seoul, Verona, and Ireland. Her work is in collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, Denver Art Museum, SFMoMA, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Tang Museum, among others. Silverthorne has been featured in publications like the New York Times, Artforum, and Sculpture Magazine. She has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work is currently on view at the Norton Museum's Strike Fast, Dance Lightly (October 2024–March 2025) and will be featured in Anonymous Was a Woman: The First Twenty-Five Years at the Grey Art Museum (April–July 2025).