Sofia Silva: Spreading Out

Ricco/Maresca Gallery is pleased to present “Spreading Out,” an exhibition of Sofia Silva’s panoramic photographs that capture the bleak beauty, striking geometry, and vacant desires of suburban America’s landscape.

As Winston Churchill famously said, “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” Silva’s fresh, focused vantage point on the everyday elucidates the symmetry with which we plan our landscapes (for good or for bad). In Silva’s own words, “art is a cultural barometer for where we are, and therefore, where we are going.” Her work holds up a lens through which we become acutely aware not only of our surroundings, but of their impact upon the land, the sky, and our bodies.

Revealing and honest, Silva’s photographs are created without digital manipulation, using the very unusual Tomiyama camera and 6 x 24 cm (2.4 x 9.4 in) negatives. The work is documentary in manner, laying bare shopping malls, parking lots, and housing developments: our backyards, and, by extension, ourselves.

Sofia Silva was born in Argentina, and her work is informed by a background in sociology as well as photography. In 2007 she participated in the 21st Annual Critic’s Residency Program, juried by Irving Sandler and Eleanor Hartney, and in 2009 received the Individual Artist Award from the Maryland Arts State Council.

Sofia Silva was awarded the “Woodstock Artist-In-Residence” at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, NY in 2010. Her work has been exhibited at such institutions as the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington DC, and at the Fondo Nacional de las Artes, among others.