Press Release
Aplril 11, 2000

The McKee Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of Jeanne Silverthorne which will include five new cast rubber paintings, two tableaux and a series of fourteen photographs. The exhibition will open to the public on Friday, April 28th and will continue through Saturday, June 3rd.

The playful and surprising manipulation of scale is an intriguing aspect of this exhibition. On the one hand, Silverthorne magnifies the byproducts of labor. These may be tiny scraps of debris from the sculptural casting process, modeled in clay at many times their original size and then cast in rubber. Or they may be the working body’s by-products –in this exhibition, sweat, gall, and ulcer-making bacteria– microscopic views of which are enlarged in drawings before being modeled in clay as framed ÒpicturesÓ to be cast in rubber.

On the other hand, Silverthorne reduces the scale of the studio to small 1 7/8 x 1/8 inch gelatin silver prints and to maquettes of objects in her studio. In this exhibition, one such object is a minature file cabinet holding the complete body of photographic work from 1992 to the present. Each tiny photo, further reduced from the framed silver gelatin print, is filed with its own 2 x 2 inch record indicating category, date, editions, etc. The result is an archive that documents itself.

Born in 1950 in Philadelphia, Jeanne Silverthorne attended Temple University and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. She has had several one-person gallery exhibitions in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Verona, and Paris. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, gave her a one-woman show in 1996, another one was held at Beloit College in 1998, and more recently in the summer-fall 1999 The Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, New York, exhibited one of her major installations.

A catalogue of the exhibition is available.