Tea Room: The better to see you…

June 18 - August 20, 2021

La Morada. RoFa Projects. Potomac. MD

Art Works

Tea Room: The better to see you…

“I have an excellent idea! Let’s change the subject!”

March Hare

Alice in Wonderland

 Some of us remember that famous psychological test that took place in the forest.

They asked us: "What is the road like? Who is with you? You see a lovely house. Describe the house.

 You decide to enter without fear. You go forward and there is a small room with a table in the middle. Describe the table. What is on and around it?

When you leave the house there is an object on the ground. What is the object? What material is it made of? What do you do with that object?

 It is impossible to stop observing the psychological constants in Silvia Levenson's work.

The resignification of materials and specifically of glass as an ambiguous element leads us to observe the contradictions, fragility and also ambiguities of human relationships.

 Tea room: The better to see you… evokes some of the fables and fairy tales. In fact, it is inside a dollhouse - pink and cute. But what hides behind the doors, of the personal stories of the glass?

In the center of the installation there is a glass table and on it a teapot with two beautiful pink cups; but both with green thorns that hypothetically transform the scene into pain and torture.

 Further back and with the same fragility there is a set of baby clothes. It makes us wonder, who are we in this world? How do our origins influence our becoming?

Our house, a room, our family, its habits, stereotypes, and behaviors, are transformed into a space loaded with content and learning; but also demands that are sometimes difficult to meet.

How many images do we remember of children falling to sleep reading fairy tales? Stories that today we understand the amount of stereotypes and questionable patterns of behavior that they created and not with the best role models.

A Cinderella, represented in Silvia's shoes, waiting for a prince and being mistreated by her stepsisters, being here characterized with a nail inside these tortuous shoes.

A swing in a forest, which at the same time reflects ideas of freedom; but you also come and go from life and its great leaps into the void.

A tearoom, in a dollhouse in the middle of a small forest with hares wanting to change the subject.

Tea room is a small hope to not change the subject, to open questions, to be able to tell the stories behind Levenson's glass objects.

Gabriela Rosso