Alice Mitchell
Artist
Harriett Casdin-Silver
(1935 - 2008)
Artist
Kevin Brown
(b. 1965)
Date1999
MediumHologram and audio dome
Dimensions26 3/4 x 21 5/8 x 1/4 in.
ClassificationsMixed Media
Credit LineCharles F. Smith Fund
Terms
Object number2000.2
DescriptionHarriet Casdin-Silver was born in 1925 in Worcester MA. She received a B.A. from the University of Vermont, in Burlington, and continued her studies at the New School for Social Research in New York City from 1946 to 1948.After working in theater, television, and radio, Casdin-Silver began her career as a visual artist in the early 1960's, primarily as a painter. She soon moved into muti-media installations, using eclectic materials like stainless steel and exhaust pipes combined with bizarre lights and her own poetry and music. This approach united her theatrical instincts and progressive political beliefs with art making.
In 1968 Casdin-Silver created her first hologram. After attending a lecture and demonstration of holography by physicist Raoul van Ligten, she contacted him, interested in borrowing an intense laser beams for use in one of her installations. Van Ligten invited her to experiment with the new technology on an informal basis, which she began to do with the help of technicians.
By 1969 Casdin-Silver had her first breakthrough. She created Glass Balls, a work in which she refused to accept the limits of technology, as they were then understood. Instead of making a hologram of a small, solid object, she made an image of a number of transparent glass balls arranged on a table eight feet long, using not one, as was the norm, but five object beams.
The result was an aesthetic triumph. Not only did Glass Balls capture the image of the spheres in great and dizzying depth, it also seemed to multiply the spheres. As a woman, Casdin-Silver felt liberated by the newness of holography, which was a fresh medium with no history of male domination.
Casdin-Silver has continued to use the technology of the hologram in consistently new and innovative ways, making her the true pioneer of the hologram art form. Her work has explored issues of feminism, the human form, the aging process, death, and issues of identity.
Alice Mitchell, is part of Harriet Casdin-Silver's series exploring the body and psyche of women. As early as 1973 Casdin-Silver started exploring figurative holograms. In the early 1980's she began to create portraits of women she knew, either by abstracting and distorting the image to suggest the stresses of personal and political changes, or by studied representations of attitudes expressed through eyes, postures, and facial expressions. Holograms make an excellent media for portraiture as they render the sitter in three dimensions with striking detail.
Casdin-Silver has continued to work on images of women through the late '90's. She keeps expanding the limits of holographic expressions, exploring the body, the self, and their entanglements with culture. Contemporary feminist ideas about objectification, the gaze, and the power of the female body have been persistent themes, as have the subject of aging, and the aging process.
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