Exhibitions

JAMES SILT: DOWN THE ROAD OMEN

Neue Welt / 507 Hagan St. August 1 - 23rd (Reception: August 1 5:00pm - 8:00pm)

James Silt

In collaboration with curator Keelan O'Sullivan, Neue Welt is pleased to present Down the Road Omen by New York-based painter and poet James Silt, opening August 1st, 5-8 PM.

This series of landscape paintings references three sites: coal mine runoff in Slusher Branch in Breathitt County, Kentucky, the Dlubak Glass plant in Anderson County, Kentucky, and Devil's Swamp Lake, a Superfund site outside of Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

While early American landscape painting saw mountains, waterfalls, and oceans as emblematic of the burgeoning nation’s grand destiny, Silt’s paintings are concerned with mineral piles and waterways of a different sort. Focused here on the lingering excesses of industrial production, his wavering, aqueous works function as an oblique approach towards perception of disasters that escape––physically, temporally, and spiritually––the capacity for human comprehension.

Silt’s paintings attempt to discover a way forward for the depiction of landscapes which escapes both the political imposition of societal narratives and the lurid overidentification with the emotional or spiritual state of a single witness. At the same time, they refuse equally the imposition of a so-called objective reality which is in fact merely the perspective of the machinic intelligence of capital itself. Down the Road Omen offers a few brief but potent gestures towards a visual lexicon which could escape the limits heretofore imposed upon both the seer and the seen.

James Silt is an artist and poet currently living and working in New York City. As Irene Silt, he is the author of The Tricking Hour (2022, Deluge Press), a book of essays on sex work composed over the course of several years in New Orleans, and My Pleasure (2022, Deluge Press), a book of poems. His poems and essays have also been published in Mask Magazine, ANTIGRAVITY, Spoil, LESTE, Trou Noir, Poiesis Journal, RADAR, and in the Tripwire pamphlet series. Keelan O'Sullivan is a writer and curator in Lexington, Kentucky. He is currently the executive director of Institute 193.