Opening Reception for Susan Silton: Diving into the Wreck, featuring The Crowing Hens

The exhibition’s public opening reception marks the first activation of Silton’s installation In everything there is the trace (2013) since its debut at USC Fisher Museum of Art, and the beginning of a public typing program that will run for the length of the exhibition. The installation centers on a circular table built from ten interlocking desks, each structurally dependent on its neighbor Ten participants at a time sit at ten manual typewriters and in this iteration will retype Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. They will type without ink, in what is called stencil mode, so the only record is the imprint of the keys striking the page.

Silton chose John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath for the 2013 installation debut for the novel’s West Coast significance and its reckoning with labor, migration, race, and class. For Diving into the Wreck, Silton has designated Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) as the text. Butler, a resident of Pasadena, and one of the most innovative writers in the genre of speculative fiction, sets her tale in a dystopian near-future (the 2020s)—a time of ecological collapse, authoritarianism, and violence.

The evening opens with refreshments on the balcony at 6:00 p.m., followed by a typing performance at 7:00 p.m. featuring writers, artists, and participants from Silton’s past works. The Crowing Hens, the all-female whistling group Silton founded in 2009, whose members include Erin Barnes, Jessica Basta, Carole Anne Kaufman, Laura Loftsgaarden, and Kathryn Nockels, will move through the crowd before gathering to perform a piece as a collective.