The Earth Opened
Featured Artist: Rick Silva
The Earth Opened
When: August 1-24, 2025
Where: Stirek Gallery
Gallery Hours:
- Tuesday - Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
- Saturdays, noon - 4 p.m.
- Sunday and Monday, Closed
The Earth Opened is a survey of recent projects by artist Rick Silva.
The artist, whose practice is centered around digital re-imaginings of our landscapes and the cinematic soundscapes that tell their stories, approaches the topic of “risk” by facilitating observations about all we stand to lose.
PEAKING visualizes over a million variations of a mountain peak in conceptual parallel to fluctuating graph lines. Modeled from the granite and glacial formations of the Cascade Mountain Range, these virtual renderings are paced to mirror the geologic deep-time of our regional landscape. The visual language of “graphs” is abstractly leveraged to mimic variable data sets: ocean temperatures, air quality, financial markets, viral variants, and heart rates. As the frequency of the formations in PEAKING escalate, so does the sentiment of environmental “peaking” itself.
Western Fronts is a response to a 2017 leaked memo from the US Department of the Interior, detailing plans to dramatically reduce the borders and areas of protection assigned to four western national monuments: Cascade Siskiyou in Oregon and California, Gold Butte in Nevada, Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears - both in Utah. The resulting artworks are the marriage of drone footage, animation, and scoring as method of mapping regions at risk.
Liquid Crystal is a series of videos that explore the relationship between the natural and technological. Our grounding in organic materials (grass, moss, sand, gravel) is connected, and in some ways threated, by extractive processes necessary to produce the screens that have come to be a part of our everyday lives. Liquid crystal displays are a phenomenon of both our natural resources and the depths to which they can be deployed to otherworldly ends.
The Earth Opened is featured on the occasion of the 2025 Society for Literature, Science and the Arts conference.
Rick Silva is a Brazilian-American artist who explores themes related to the environment and our future. His work has been exhibited at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Centre Pompidou, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Silva has been featured in Artforum, Wired, and Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology. He received his MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder, and lives in Eugene Oregon where he is a Professor at The University of Oregon.
