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The history of Tim Silver's work is a history of destruction. Over the past five years or so, he has made a lot of work, but not much of it has survived. Either by accident or design, his small cast sculptures and installations have smashed, melted, crumbled and rotted, enacting a gentle anarchy, albeit bounded by the rituals of exhibition display. The show must go on. Yet it is this slightly showbizzy aspect to Silver's work, its apparent frivolity and celebration of surface, which gives it its particular edge. Like many artists of his generation, Silver's works are made for exhibition, a result of pragmatism as much as anything else (limited storage, the high costs of production, and so on). More than most, however, Silver's approach and media makes this situation abundantly clear. The temporariness of his work relies on the exhibition for its very existence, able only to last as long as the few weeks of the show, and often not even that. His fragile materials--crayon, chocolate, fairy flossare by nature to be consumed, and quickly. Furthermore, the playful, tactile qualities of his objects demand to be handled, with consistently disastrous results.
The directness of Silver's sculpturesstraightforward casts from 'boy's toys' for the most part-builds on this sense of lightness and play. At odds with the more allusive, slippery sculptures of many of his peers, which till the fertile field between representation and non-representation, they follow the contours of their source material closely. The shape and scale of the guitars, toy cars and motorbikes, Action Men, skateboards and, most dramatically, the full-size Vespa, are not transformed by the artist in any major way. Indeed, the precise detail and similitude... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline