This June, Distortion Society presents What She Builds, She Must Destroy, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Gallery Director Michelle Silver. Through a mix of figurative painting and gestural abstraction, Silver explores the contradictions inherent in motherhood: the tension between creation and destruction, restriction and permission, duty and desire. She questions traditional narratives around child-rearing, societal expectations, and maternal guilt while asking: does a mother have the power, the right, to destroy what she builds?

Completed in the past year but marking specific moments from the seven years since her first child was born, Silver’s paintings present a pictorial manifesto for coming into maternal power, an ideal version of herself that she has not yet fully surrendered to. Here, we see the archetype of Mother not as a martyr, but as a free-thinking, spirited, fallible beast. She is the owner of her pleasure and her emotional and intellectual promiscuity. She acknowledges the violence of childbirth, the visceral destruction of her body and mind, and harnesses this pain as her power. The Mother gives love, holds discomfort, and heals wounds. She defiantly confronts chaos and asserts herself, even when female rage makes people uncomfortable–“it is not becoming of her,” they say. To this, the Mother smiles and unleashes a guttural howl, unfurling the beast inside her.

In What She Builds, She Must Destroy, Silver’s brushstrokes are an extension of that archetypal Mother’s scream. She paints womanhood and motherhood in all its ugliness and glory. Frantic strokes and fiery shades engulf her figures while indiscernible forms collide on the canvas. She builds up her canvases over time, layering paint sometimes to the point of overworking, necessitating a complete act of destruction—smeared paint, violent strokes, and an element of surprise—to bring the work to completion. Silver’s paintings do not offer resolution or redemption, instead they insist on being lived in, wrestled with, and metabolized.

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