Sonja John

Sonja John curatorial projects and The Yard, Williamsburg are pleased to present SOLSTICE, a solo show featuring ninety-five quilts by Caroline Silverman.

Caroline Silverman: Solstice features 95 quilts by Caroline Silverman made as a daily project between the summer solstice and autumnal equinox, 2020. This exhibition chronicles a time of retrospection and meditation through process. Each day, a quilt block would be constructed from any sewable materials, each measuring about 12 inches square. Originally conceptualized in summer 2019, SOLSTICE sought to take the constant shift of light from golden hour to nightfall on long summer days and linger in the tension of capturing surroundings in moments of change or precipice.

In the wake of 2020, with its subsequent anxieties and restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, Silverman’s daily practice served as an observation of time and ritual. Working intuitively in the heirloom language of quilting, scrap fabrics, abandoned projects or converted pieces of clothing from her own closet constructed a record of the artist’s immediate surroundings during a long period of isolation. The quilts became diary entries of a sort — each one a spontaneous examination of both material availability and mental state, sporting rips, gaps, warps, improvised materials such as paper napkins, and areas of resistance in the joins of incompatible fabric. 

Throughout the duration of the project, only two days were missed.

 The first, Day 9, was missed due to an injury. The second, Day 91, was missed following news of the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In both instances, the project was not intentionally paused, but simply forgotten in the wake of life. In the exhibition, these breaks in Silverman’s chronological progression are represented as absent spaces on the wall —brief pauses in the relentless march of days in lockdown, from summer to fall.

SOLSTICE will be on view from August 12 - November 14th, 2021. 

Opening Thursday, August 19th, 2021