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BIOGRAPHY
Vicki DaSilva creates striking single-frame time exposure photographs with four and eight-foot fluorescent tube lamps encased in colored gels. Using tracks or a pulley system to move the tubes, she traces the topography of landscapes and articulates the structure of buildings and bridges. Her vibrant images combine ordinary reality and abstract expanses of colored light.
DaSilva was born in Bethesda, MD in 1960. She studied fine arts at Kutztown University, concentrating in photography, and received her BFA in 1983. While at Kutztown, she was part of James Carroll's New Arts Program, which exposed DaSilva to developments in contemporary art. The program provided her an internship in New York with Joan Jonas, the video and performance artist, working for her from 1981-84. During this period, DaSilva was becoming familiar with the burgeoning downtown art scene, including the work of Richard Serra, for whom she was a personal assistant through the 1980s. She was particularly drawn to hip hop culture, the art of Kutztown native Keith Haring, and the work of graffiti artists.
DaSilva's early work, set-up photographs often done outside at night, was influenced by Jonas's improvisational spirit and by the work of younger artists, such as Cindy Sherman and James Casabere, whose images explored a fictive approach to photographic reality. In 1983, DaSilva began a series of photographs using incandescent bulbs to create graffiti of words and abstract images, composed of light rather than spray paint.
While on a trip to Paris in 1986, Vicki met Antonio DaSilva, an electrician, who would become her husband and the technical collaborator in her photographic work. Their first project together resulted in a series of abstract color photographs made by moving a hand-held four-foot fluorescent lamp. In 1988, he rigged a pulley system to slowly raise a fluorescent tube vertically, creating a virtual plane of colored light. Using time exposure photography, one tube could be deployed multiple times in a single image. This series and succeeding work reflects DaSilva's interest in artists who have used light, such as Dan Flavin, James Turrell, and Robert Irwin.
Beginning in 2004, DaSilva started using a modular portable track system, devised by Antonio, to allow the fluorescent tube to follow a sloping hillside. Taken in multiple runs, the photographs that resulted, in the series Non-Function Follows Form and Union Terrace, were flowing fields of light, in radiant monochromes or vivid stripes. Other series used the pulley system to create sheets or paths of color appearing within bridges and emanating from buildings.
DaSilva has had solo exhibitions at Art Gotham in New York City, Flanders 311 in Raleigh and Cedar Crest College in Allentown. Her group shows include those at Center for Photography at Woodstock, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh, Lafayette College, and a traveling exhibition that started at the Lancaster Museum and traveled to six institutions in Pennsylvania. Her work was included in the catalogue for the 2006 exhibition, Light Art from Artificial Light, at the ZKM/Museum for Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, Germany. In 2001 and 2003, DaSilva was a recipient of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship for photography.
