Skip to main content
  • Home
  • About
  • Faculty Experts
  • For The Media
  • Videos
  • Topics
    • Alumni
    • Events
    • Faculty
    • Library
    • Research
    • Students
    • All Topics
  • Contact
  • Submit
Arts & Culture
  • All News
  • Arts & Culture
  • Business & Economy
  • Campus & Community
  • Health & Society
  • Media, Law & Policy
  • STEM
  • Veterans
  • |
  • Alumni
  • The Peel
  • Athletics
Sections
  • All News
  • Arts & Culture
  • Business & Economy
  • Campus & Community
  • Health & Society
  • Media, Law & Policy
  • STEM
  • Veterans
  • |
  • Alumni
  • The Peel
  • Athletics
  • Home
  • About
  • Faculty Experts
  • For The Media
  • Videos
  • Topics
    • Alumni
    • Events
    • Faculty
    • Library
    • Research
    • Students
    • All Topics
  • Contact
  • Submit
Arts & Culture

Light Work Presents ‘Pacifico Silano: The Eyelid Has Its Storms . . .’

Wednesday, April 1, 2020, By Cjala Surratt
Share
Light Work
paintings by Pacifico Silano on wall

Exhibiting artist Pacifico Silano contemplates pain and photography’s role in the struggle for queer
visibility while celebrating enduring love, compassion, and community

Stay Connected! Visit  Light Work online to see The Eyelid Has Its Storms… , a solo exhibition of photographs by Brooklyn-based artist Pacifico Silano. Through the appropriation of photographs from vintage gay pornography magazines, Silano creates colorful collages that explore print culture and the histories of the LGBTQ+ community. His large-scale works evoke strength and sexuality while acknowledging the underlying repression and trauma that marginalized individuals experience. Born at the height of the AIDS epidemic, Silano lost his uncle to complications from HIV. “After he died,” says Silano, “his memory was erased by my family due to the shame of his sexuality and the stigma of HIV/AIDS around that time period.”

Silano set out to create art that reconciles that loss and erasure. His exhibition somberly contemplates pain and photography’s role in the struggle for queer visibility, while celebrating enduring love, compassion and community. Copies of Silano’s exhibition catalog, Contact Sheet 206, are available to collectors in the Light Work Shop.

works by Pacifico Silano on gallery walls

Works from Pacifico Silano’s show The Eyelids Has Its Storms

Pacifico Silano’s The Eyelid Has Its Storms… borrows its title from a Frank O’Hara poem. O’Hara’s musings and observations about everyday queer life inspired Silano’s artistic practice. “The eyelid has its storms,” the poem begins. “There is the opaque fish-scale green of it after swimming in the sea and then suddenly wrenching violence, strangled lashed, and a barbed wire of sand falls onto the shore.” O’Hara’s deeply visual poem, like Silano’s work, evokes duality—in memory, in the present and future, shimmering beauty and umbral violence often occur at once.

In collaging, Silano fragments, obscures and layers images that he has rephotographed from these magazines. He reassembles and ultimately recontextualizes these images, removing the overtly explicit original content. “These new pictures-within-pictures are silent witnesses that allude to absence and presence,” says Silano. He sees them as stand-in memorials, both for the now-missing models as well as those who originally consumed their images. Silano meditates on the meaning of the images and tearsheets that he collects over time. What continually excites him is precisely the  “slipperiness” of representation and meaning in photography as our culture shifts. “The lens that we read [images] through today gives them new context and meaning,” he observes. “In another 30 or 40 years, they might very well mean something completely different.”

About the Artist

portrait of artist Pacifico Silano

Pacifico Silano

Pacifico Silano is a lens-based artist born in Brooklyn. He has an MFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts. His group shows include the Bronx Museum, Museo Universitario del Chopo in Mexico City, Oude Kerk in Amsterdam, and Tacoma Art Museum. His solo shows include Baxter ST@CCNY, The Bronx Museum, Fragment Gallery in Moscow, Rubber-Factory, and Stellar Projects. Aperture, Artforum, and The New Yorker have reviewed his work. Silano’s awards include the Aaron Siskind Foundation’s Individual Photographer’s Fellowship, Finalist for the Aperture Foundation Portfolio Prize, and First Prize at Amsterdam’s Pride Photo Awards. His work is in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. Silano participated in Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence Program in 2016. Tune into Light Work Podcast with exhibiting artist Pacifico Silano.

General Information 

The Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery is temporarily closed to the public as part of our commitment to helping flatten the COVID-19 curve. All scheduled receptions and artist talks are canceled until further notice. We encourage you to visit Light Work exhibitions online, check out our catalog of artist videos and tune into the recently launched Light Work Podcast: Today’s Artists. On Photography.

Light Work is located in the Robert B. Menschel Media Center at 316 Waverly Avenue, Syracuse, New York, 13224. Follow Light Work on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. For general information, please visit www.lightwork.org, call (315) 443-1300, or email info@lightwork.org.

  • Author

Cjala Surratt

  • Recent
  • Syracuse University Ranked in the Top 25 for Best Online Graduate Information Technology Programs by U.S. News & World Report
    Tuesday, January 26, 2021, By News Staff
  • WAER 88.3 FM Welcomes New Sports Director
    Tuesday, January 26, 2021, By Mary Kate Intaglietta
  • The State of the Immigration Courts
    Tuesday, January 26, 2021, By News Staff
  • Athlete, Activist Maya Moore Joins the Martin Luther King Jr. Virtual Event Series Jan. 27
    Tuesday, January 26, 2021, By News Staff
  • Health Promotion Advocate and Alumnus Sidney Lerner ’53 Remembered
    Tuesday, January 26, 2021, By News Staff

More In Arts & Culture

Drama Department to Virtually Present New Theatrical Work Inspired by University’s 150th Anniversary

Inspired by Syracuse University’s 150th anniversary, the Department of Drama in the College of Visual and Performing Arts (VPA) will virtually present “Impact: Past, Present, Future,” a new theatrical piece that will be performed live in a series of four staged…

Special Collections Research Center Launches Latin American 45s Digital Collection

Syracuse University Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center (SCRC), working in partnership with the Digital Library Program (DLP), recently launched the Belfer Latin American 45s Digital Collection. The digital collection will eventually provide access to over 12,000 recordings that date from…

VPA Faculty to Present World Premieres at Society for New Music Concert Jan. 31

Performers affiliated with the Setnor School of Music in the College of Visual and Performing Arts (VPA) are teaming up with the Society for New Music (SNM) for world premieres by two up-and-coming composers. Cellist Gregory Wood and percussionist Rob…

Sound Beat: Access Audio Offering Children’s Audiobooks about Enslaved People by Cheryl Wills ’89

Sound Beat: Access Audio is providing two free family audiobooks written by Emmy Award-winning journalist Cheryl Wills ’89,  the great-great-great granddaughter of Emma and Sandy Wills, enslaved people from Haywood, Tennessee. The audiobooks are narrated by the author and are…

Syracuse Stage Announces Changes to the 2020/2021 Season

Syracuse Stage announced adjustments to the schedule for the remainder of the 2020/2021 season. These adjustments include replacing previously announced shows with new titles and come in direct response to the evolving situation concerning the COVID-19 pandemic. Starting in February,…

Subscribe to SU Today

If you need help with your subscription, contact sunews@syr.edu.

Connect With Us

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Youtube
  • LinkedIn
Social Media Directory

For the Media

Find an Expert Follow @SyracuseUNews
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Youtube
  • LinkedIn
  • @SyracuseU
  • @SyracuseUNews
  • @SUCampus
  • Social Media Directory
  • Accessibility
  • Privacy
  • Campus Status
  • Syracuse.edu
© 2021 Syracuse University News. All Rights Reserved.