aviva silverman
Aviva Silverman is an artist working across mediums and spiritual realms. In this conversation, we talk about artistic lineages, visibilizing sound, and the importance of preservation work. Born in New York City, they now reside in Queens.
I hope you enjoy our conversation. It has been edited from a spoken interview and condensed for clarity.
Artwork photos courtesy of the artist, unless noted; artist portrait courtesy of Hannah Cash
I find it helpful to understand one’s early journey. When we initially chatted, you mentioned that you studied robotics and sculptural studies. Can you speak to that initial attraction to technology?
It was twenty years ago when physical interface design was more primitive but I’ve always been drawn to science fiction and futurism(s). I loved how, in 2004, the marriage of art and science could produce emergent technologies. I was studying artists like Stelarc. It’s interesting to think about my relationship to gender now and how that relates to those earlier ideas of trans-humanism and body modification.
After living in Berlin post-college and moving back to take care of my mother, I started to work for a posthumanist-architecture studio called Reversible Destiny founded by Madeline Gins and Shūsaku Arakawa. It became formative for me to work for a woman in her seventies who had just lost her husband and whose practice was centered on the subjects of trans-humanism and immortality through built works in architecture. I stayed there for three-and-a-half years, just before Madeline’s death which closely followed my mother’s. I was very much mentored and influenced by her practice.
Can you describe her practice?
Gins and Arakawa’s book, Architectural Body, explains their philosophy through diagrammatic language. It’s a pain to read because you have to learn a new vernacular, their language of world-building, to understand Reversible Destiny’s vision. It’s not just admiring architectural space from afar, but activating your sense of the world by moving differently through it. In committing to a changed awareness and orientation towards the environment, they believed that you could reengineer your vitality from a cellular level outwards. Most of their built work lives in Japan because American building codes require safety measures that don’t comply with Reversible Destiny’s radical revisioning of built spaces.
What do you take from her practice into yours?
Madeline called herself a “multi-hyphenate puzzle creature” meaning that she identified with many different disciplines. Her email sign off would be: in Reversible Destiny mode, artist-scientist-viability juggler-healer of the inconsolable, Madeline. I strongly relate to that sense of teleological interconnectedness.
In talking about experiencing her bigger reckonings with immortality and death, do you consider that a driving force of your practice as well?
I think people fixate on the “we have decided not to die” motto, when, in fact, I think they were like, how do we live with more vibrancy-life-spirit? And how does that get integrated in all ways?
That’s the part I’ve continuously thought about since we first spoke—how you reframed Madeline’s work as not about how you live longer but how you live more. It's not about immortality, per se, but an abundance of mortality.
I love that. More-tality.
Can we talk about that in relation to your work? How are you seeking to tap into those ideas?
Lately, I’ve been working with microtonal vibrations emitted by sine waves. When they play at different frequencies they create a very visceral, intense sensation in the body that has potential healing effects. For a show at Marta Herford in Germany last year, I made a twelve-foot anthropomorphic arrangement of model railway tracks extending over a sound-responsive LED system entitled Door of Breath II. The form emulated the shape of the human nervous system and lit up in relation to a sine wave score I composed in tandem with the noise in the room.
Door of Breath II, 2024 (video excerpt), G-Scale train tracks, RGB pixel strip, Enttec driver, computer, 450 x 364 cm
It feels incomplete to understand the experience just by watching the video or looking at an installation photo. It is fortuitous that I am talking to you now because I have recently engaged with several different sonic interactions, both in artistic and meditative spaces, and am still finding the words to make sense of those experiences.
Sound frequencies can shape one’s experience of space invisibly and be felt physically. I just finished reading Pauline Oliveros’s Quantum Listening and learned so much from her writing. We can hear without listening—it’s a passive act. But it’s the quality of our listening or what she defines as “deep listening” that shapes how we interpret the world.
We encounter sound every day, but we don’t really know what to do with it and we don’t think of it in more abstract ways. Living in New York, you have constant noise, sirens, a drill, honking.
Madeline used to open up the blinds—she lived on Houston Street—and exclaim “my symphony” and it’d just be guys drilling holes in concrete, buses, people shouting, birds chirping.
Exactly!
Do you know of La Monte Young’s sound installation, Dream House, in Tribeca? I’ve been studying this work—an installation consisting of thirty-three prime numbers playing all at once. La Monte is in his eighties, and lives in the apartment below his installation. I often think of him in his wheelchair, directly below my body when I’m lying on that floor. Earlier this year I attended an event where he performed with his protege, Jung Hee Choi. They collaboratively played a Robert Morris custom-made gong that was the size of the room. Instead of striking the gong, they sawed it for an hour, which was one of the most excruciating noises. Throughout the performance, I found a way to psychically crawl into a part of my mind that I had not known existed. When I emerged, I was changed. It was one of the more radical experiences I’ve had, for better or for worse. In extreme moments, what does self-soothing look like? These frequencies can allow you to enter a space of your mind you might not have access to consciously.
It sounds like bringing about a new relationship to our consciousness is part of your work, and similar to how Madeline or La Monte seek to defamiliarize our movements through space or sound in order to intensify our awareness of living.
I just thought about Fox News and the ways we live in specific tunnels of information. What we think about or look for in the world is now algorithmically attuned to us and so we never actually see outside of it. Sometimes I think about how we approach art through that lens. We’re looking for or trying to find the thing we already think we know and assume about the work. Sometimes there’s less spaciousness to experience it. With sound, it doesn’t matter if you have limiting factors, intellectually or otherwise. Sound transcends all boundaries.
Earlier, you mentioned this idea of “making visible” and that feels relevant to another facet of your practice—how I was first introduced to your work by Maggie—your relation to the NYC Trans Oral History Project. Can you talk about that?
It’s a grassroots volunteer-led project, founded by two academics who were in conversation with lawyers and activists working with incarcerated trans people. They were interested in what was needed to help aid in the legal process. From that, the oral history project was established to help people tell their own stories in their own voice. Historically, trans life is told through legal, medical, and criminal records which are usually violating and exploitative. So this was a deeply politicized intervention to counter “the written word” through giving back agency to the people whose lives were subjected to scrutiny. I joined in 2018 and have been the project coordinator for many years now. I love interviewing people and have contributed upwards of forty entries to the archive by now.
Wow, that is an incredible project.
Preservation work is extremely important, especially now, given the current administration’s fixation on erasing trans life.
In 2020 when my dear friend Rona Sugar Love was re-arrested after serving thirty-five years in prison, our interview was the only document used in her case to humanize her life experience. I could see firsthand how this legal aid helped visibilize and support her humanity.
Can you expand more on that draw towards preservation?
The urge to collect and store memory is a form of grief-work. I first came to the world of archives through my collecting of rocks, letters, textiles, faux-finish brushes—evidence of artists I’ve loved or worked for who have passed on. In my art life, it’s looking at what’s been saved through history and questioning it. I’m always asking: Where is memory located? What gets forgotten?
This leads directly into a large part of your practice, the use of found objects. In particular, your use of Catholic figurines, which is surprising because you are Jewish and openly identify and engage as such.
I work with a gallery in Italy called Veda. Something changed when I started working with them where I became engrossed in Italian material culture. Judaism doesn’t have many material symbols or icons so it was really beautiful to be in spaces that produced so much religious art history that could be traced through generations of their material mutations.
I went to nativity factories in Tuscany and collected defective and mostly imperfect figurines made from the mechanic process. I bought bins of them and created different sculptures. Purgatory was made from a pile of melted sacred and ritual figurines and re-formed into a birdbath. The factory makes them in a beige plastic to represent their race.
Purgatory, 2019, plastic religious figurines, taxidermied European Starlings, resin, 81.28 x 50.8 x 50.8 cm
And it has extended beyond just the Italian Catholic figurines to American Christian figurines, correct?
Because we live in America and Christianity is the dominant culture, I’ve metabolized a lot of it through its iconography of saints, Jesus, Mary, etc. It is information for us to look at and think about because it informs laws, calendars, time. I have every right to work with it, to think with and against it. Madeline Gin’s ethic was that we’re not just our bodies, we are our architectural bodies. All of our built surroundings inform who we are.
You’ve referred to these figurines as “protective symbols.” What draws you to create or seek out symbols of protection?
I think death really does that. Angelology was something I explored for years but now I’m asking myself, why didn’t I study demonology afterwards? My interests are cyclical because I still want to understand what it means to summon external protection. I grew up Reform Jewish and angels, though they exist, are mostly written out of prayer texts. Ancient Judaic literature describes them more architecturally as wheels or circuits of energy.
I was especially interested in the relationship of surveillance between humans and angels. I think of angels as interstitial judges carrying information that they witness to inform the Book of Judgment. Damon Zucconi, one of my friends and artistic peers, said that living is an act of publishing because the angels are always transcribing your thoughts and actions to be morally judged later.
Specifically you’ve referred to this as “spiritual surveillance.”
A lot of my work considers different forms of protective and god-like entities that serve as a witness or an agent of surveillance. The recording angel in Judaic, Christian, and Islamic angelology takes account of a person’s actions, thoughts, and feelings. The consequences of these accounts through an interstitial being is interesting to me.
Beyond these religious figurines, your practice pulls from a lot of existing imagery or found objects.
That’s always been my balance—creating imagery I want to exist, which in the last five years has been a lot of historical people, insurrectionists, queer people, trans people, sex workers who possess power and spirit and history and have been persecuted through time.
My train sculpture, titled Queen City Special, was a product of that. I populated the train with individuals linked to one another through my personal history rather than historically. Because I work with Americana and tchotchkes in other parts of my practice, it felt like a more beloved project to iconize the people most meaningful to me.
Who are some of the figures you included?
There is Madeline Gins who rides the last train car. She has a miniature train encircling her foot. The colorful poles emulate the ones in the Bioscleave House, a built work that exists in Long Island. There is also CA Conrad, a brilliant poet, and the iconic Cheyenne Doroshow, founder of G.L.I.T.S. They’re all handmade and composed of clay. Anyone who was living I called and asked for permission to recreate. They were all very down to be on the train.
Queen City Special, 2020, miniature clay figurines, trains, tracks, dimensions variable. Photo by David Stjernholm
What is it about trains that persists throughout your work?
Trains became another container, a way to hold a vignette or story. There’s also their movement. I’ve started drawing with railroad tracks in two-dimensional tapestry pieces in more organic compositions. It’s really hard not to make figurative work that immediately has a face or name, something identifiable. For me, to go to this place of abstraction is a deliberate challenge.
Taking some of these different areas that you’ve gone deep into, and knowing that your engagement with sound is in many ways just beginning, I wonder how the spirituality and the sound intersect for you.
That’s a great question I’m figuring out. I have felt divinity through so many forms. Sound is like that too. It‘s undeniable, when you feel connected or moved. And so that is a very spiritual experience.
As part of your deeply multi-disciplinary approach, you’re also teaching at Dia Art Foundation and Maryland Institute College of Art and artistic director of a new gallery space, Salma Sarriedine. Can we talk about making sense of that within your practice?
Volunteering with the NYC Trans Oral History Project and contributing to that form of activism has been such an important decentering process because I’m just listening. I’m the witness. It feels worthy of my labor and my time. It also gives purpose in a way that I need to stay grounded in this extremely violent world.
My curation similarly helps give people visibility, a platform and some resources to create. I hope it helps further their artistic ambitions.
Is there something in your practice that you either haven’t touched on in a long time or don’t feel like you got fully to where you wanted?
Totally, I have a folder of past ideas or different veins of research and material studies that never actualized. There’s also a lot of projects that were put on hold and never worked out, namely in 2020. Maybe they will still be relevant and come back again.
Part of this interview series is that I’m asking each artist to direct me to the next. So, who is an artist working today that you are intrigued by, and what is it about their practice you’re intrigued by?
I’ve always been transfixed by Early Shinada’s mind. Over the last twenty years I’ve been enamored with their disposition towards the world—their complexity, empathy, orientation towards the abject, analysis, embodiment. May it be a footprint that ricochets through the space-time continuum into many lifetimes. Their writing and social-political relations co-create their practice. As listeners, we get to feel the weaving of memories, heart and world systems explode and expand into something that’s singularly transmitted through them.
Published June 1, 2025