THE WORLD-BUILDING OF ROSE SILBERMAN-GORN

Sometimes the pure need for self-expression can pilot a life. So it has been thus far in the young life of artist Rose Silberman-Gorn.

Her studio is on the top floor of the old house where she lives on Binghamton’s West Side- the kind of house where the banister post of the front stairway is adorned with lovely wood carvings and the claustrophobic, unadorned back stairway- clearly once leading to a servant’s room- takes her up to her intimate workspace. She is diminutive and bursting with energy contained within a collected exterior. Her work table is so wobbly that one wonders how she works at it without it collapsing. But she does. She often plays with her dark, curly hair while she is thinking or speaking. On the day Carousel visited, Rose had just turned 24.

“I do things that are like a combination of cute, creepy, weird, and kind of surreal,” she explains. When asked what draws her to “creepy” she plays with her hair and answers, “I don’t really know.” Thus prodded to self-analysis, she remembers that, as a child, “I couldn’t watch half the Disney movies because I thought they were too scary. Part of me thinks I, like, took my fears and twisted them around and became, like, obsessed with them. I also like the juxtaposition of cute and creepy. It’s mildly unsettling.” The creation of Rose Silberman-Gorn’s worlds- whether the plain of a single figure or an intricate environment populated with tightly-packed images- are invitations to come and dwell a while in another reality.

Of her childhood in Latham, New York, in the state’s Capital District, Silberman-Gorn says that, while most children draw a lot, “I drew a ridiculous amount and it made me super happy.” Her mother is a textile artist, so the creativity in visual art is, doubtless, inherited. “I have, like, endless enthusiasm for it,” she says. “Some people need self-expression; I have to do it.”

Rose’s work was featured in some group shows in Albany during her time at Sage College, from which she graduated in 2012 with a degree in Creative Studies with an emphasis in Fine Arts. She has not yet had a solo show. She also posts most of her pieces online.

The word “phases,” when applied to Silberman-Gorn’s evolving work, gets a bad reaction from her. She much prefers to refer to the periods of her work as changes in “styles.” “Childhood Nightmares” is the series in a style she began in 2013 when she was part of a group show at the Broome County Library. “When I was inspired to start this series I went through all my childhood photos and picked out ones that had hints of, like, creepy things,” like a pair of headless dolls in a chair- a photo taken by her mom. In Rose’s depiction, the chair is anthropomorphized. “I like faces. I’ve always been obsessed with faces,” she says. (Subtly, her latest work in progress- a teeming piece she has been working on for months- depicts faces within a face. “With this piece, when I drew something one time I would, like, draw it five more times…I kind of just figure things out as I go along. I’m not super-premeditated.”)

The “Childhood Nightmare” series is ongoing, and was paralleled for a while by the “Fishes & Houses” series: suburban scenes, harkening again to her upbringing, but with recurring images of fish and fish bowls (“fish houses”). “I’m always thinking of imagery,” she says as she points out images that she often repeats, like crowns and tiaras, or symmetrical body parts with one being good, the other evil. Some, she says, are symbolic; some are not.

Basically everything she has done since 2012 has been part of what Rose calls her “cartoonish” style in “bright, ridiculous colors. Colors are very impactful…I really like unnatural colors…If my colors are really beautiful then people can look at them, and even if they don’t like the imagery, they can still enjoy it aesthetically. They can be, like, ‘I don’t get it, it’s not for me, but it’s aesthetically pleasing.’” She elaborates, “The bright colors kind of contrast with some of the imagery. Some of the imagery is kind of dark but it’s in these bright colors. So it’s like a song that sounds happy but then when you listen to the lyrics it’s, like, whoa!”

She doodles frequently. One of her Facebook posts says, “Sad clowns are my new obsession.” She recalls, “There were, like, two weeks where I was just, like, sad clowns: I must draw them everywhere.”

Silberman-Gorn’s favorite medium has become markers. She hasn’t used much paint recently; she has dabbled with just a touch of collage, and has not risen from two dimensions into any type of sculpture. “Once you figure out what your style is, you want to be consistent. You want your work to be cohesive,” she says, then plays with her hair. “I guess I could experiment more.”

The hesitation to venture into the sculptural realm may be part of Rose’s expressed desire to collaborate. “I just work 2D, like drawings and paintings just on paper. I really can’t build stuff. Three dimensions, I just can’t wrap my head around it.” Required to do an installation while in college, Rose chose to do it in a restroom. “That was my way of doing it without having to build anything,” she explains. “I used translucent adhesive paper. I painted on that and I attached it to the stall and the floor and the toilet. I turned the bathroom into this, like, creepy thing,” with, again, an anthropomorphic toilet. “People need a better bathroom experience,” she joked.

Also during her college career, Silberman-Gorn was awarded a scholarship to study in France at the Paris College of Art for a semester in her sophomore year. There was only a four-month lead time from the surprise of the award to the departure for Paris, and she spoke no French. She thought she would gain a basic knowledge of the language by taking out books from the library. “That didn’t really work,” she confesses, but of studying art in Paris she says, “It was fantastic,” the best parts being the “amazing museums” and the “beautiful architecture.”

“You can kind of go around and sketch [in the streets] and no one looks at you strangely.” She also had a full scholarship while at Sage College and the highest grade point average in her freshman class. Is she an overachiever, one may ask? “Other people have told me that I am,” is her sheepish answer.

The Creative Studies/Fine Arts degree essentially means a major in both art and writing, a study path which has carried Rose steadily. She has been a staff writer for Triple Cities Carousel since shortly after the paper’s birth in 2013, primarily writing features about- you know- artists. So, with these dual skills, it may come as a surprise that when it comes to titling her paintings and drawings, she says she is “not great” at it. “If I need a title I’ll just call it, like, what it is like: ‘Creature with No Face’ or whatever.”

She writes essays and fiction. But, in true Emily Dickinson-fashion, much of her writings live in drawers. “A lot of the fiction that I write is a bit similar to my art. It’s someplace between reality and fantasy. I don’t like fantasy that’s full-blown. I like when it seems like reality but weird things happen. Then you can, kind of, world-build.”

Many of the works that Rose has posted online are still in her studio, and it is surprising, in person, that some of them- like the pink, internal organ-like figure standing on eyeballs- are as small as a greeting card. “These were meant to be presents for people; then I liked them too much,” she says. “So then I just never gave them to them.” She laughs.

She admits to having thought that if her pieces were small, they wouldn’t take much time to do. Wrong. “They still took a decent amount of time.” Part of the reason why there are so many works still in her studio, is Rose’s discomfort with self-promotion. She has sold some commissioned artwork but it has been a vastly different style from her norm. Potential patrons can view available works online at the Society6 art marketplace but, “I’m not really great at marketing myself,” she affirms.

What does she want people to walk away with after viewing her work? “I like it if people have this sense of connection to it, even if they don’t know exactly what I mean. I think it’s probably, like, a fun viewing experience if they’re getting involved with it- if they can kind of can feel what I’m doing even if they don’t know it intellectually. I like it when people get into the imagery and try to figure out what it is, and when they bring their own ideas of what it is.”

View her works at facebook.com/RoseSilbermanGornArtPage, rosesilbermangorn.tumblr.com, and society6.com.