Lynn Silverman will judge our Open competition on March 14.
Lynn left for Sydney, Australia almost immediately after graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in photography from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. She originally planned to stay one year, but partly due to her attraction to the extraordinary landscape of the Australian desert, she ended up staying six years. The severity and seeming emptiness of the desert landscape was a challenge to photograph. The topography has none of the picturesque elements that one associates with landscape imagery. In the end, she realized that the choice of subject matter is only part of the game, and that like a surveyor, photographing is an orienting activity.
The act of photographing is discovering a series of relationships between you and the world. Lynn loves exploring the photographic frame as a process of inclusion and exclusion. For her, it is also fascinating to see how editing a collection of photographs for an exhibition or book brings another kind of depth to a single image. During her sixteen years in England, she photographed other subjects such as tabletops, clouds, light bulbs, and windows, using some of the strategies that she employed in Australia.
Lynn has had the good fortune to work in several art schools, and the perspective gained from this is central to her interaction with students. For example, it was exciting for her to be part of the development of a new art school in Sydney. The exposure to a variety of teaching structures both here and abroad has given Lynn a chance to observe how different programs handle the relationship between practice and theory. Lynn continues to value the infinite number of responses that students bring to the classroom and understands how this impacts her own speculations as an artist and teacher.
Lynn has participated in many solo and group exhibitions in Europe, Australia, and the United States. She has published four books. Her work may be found in public and private collections in Australia, Great Britain, and the U.S. In 2010, she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to the Czech Republic. Lynn’s most recent exhibitions include Outlook-Insight: Windows in the Arts at the Museum Sinclair-Haus in Bad Homberg, Germany, and a solo show, Still Light, at Goya Contemporary in Baltimore.
Lynn currently teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.