Marisa Gonzales Silverstein

Marisa Gonzales Silverstein’s paper sculpture, created by carefully cutting, folding, and gluing small pieces of paper into designs, is contemplative and meditative. She plays with pattern and repetition, geometry and rhythm, light and shadows.  What looks airy and ephemeral from one angle is heavy and harsh from another.  From afar the pieces might seem perfect, but closer inspection reveals that hand-folded and hand-cut shapes leave little room for perfection.


Silverstein’s most recent series comments on how quickly we can move from a sense of order and stability to chaos.  Long, thin strips of paper engender soft curves or hard angles. Breaking from the regular cadence of folds, Silverstein creates movement, ruptures, and shifts, showing how structures we have taken for granted begin to fail. 


Silverstein’s work has been exhibited at Urban Studio Unbound in Yonkers, Upstream Gallery in Hastings-on-Hudson, The Rockland Center for the Arts, and the Derfner Judaica Museum in New York.  In 2016, Silverstein received a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts for the photography of her sculpture series called “92 Americans. Every day.”


Courtesy of the Artist