LEWITT HESSE RICHARD SILVER

The assignment was to make a gift for the artist Sol Lewitt (1927-2007). Legendarily generous to other artists, Lewitt exchanged works with anyone who sought him out, from famous peers to admirers who sent him unsolicited objects and images. Filmmaker Shelly Silver asked her close friend, writer Frances Richard, to collaborate by contributing text for a short film. The text chosen is a series of quotations from Lewitt’s close friend Eva Hesse (1936-1970): “All order is ephemeral … chaos eats into order … yet it has its own order … if order could be chaos, chaos can be structured as non-chaos.”
On Mosco Street in New York City’s Chinatown, a not-quite fixed camera tracks the ephemeral order composed on a warm afternoon by a fence, some trees, a set of shadows, and the passage of pedestrians and traffic. The image is nearly monochrome though filmed without manipulation in broad daylight. Preoccupied with abstract propositions including the grid as a delineator of space and the modulation of light on unlike surfaces, the 6-minute film is also a mini-vérité, its extremely quiet chaos structured by ambient sound and tiny urban incident. (Source: https://www.shellysilver.com)