In the past year, reflecting on one’s mortality has been for most an involuntary existential burden. The spread of the pandemic has tethered individuals to the isolated confines of home, to the Internet, and to the deadends of virtual realities, all cyclically failing us, leaving us hanging in a void of our own loneliness.

In Steep Bend, Light Step Jonathan Silverman weaves together a tapestry of vulnerability. With intricate charcoal drawings, an expansive five-piece verdant panorama, and large paintings, we are introduced to a budding new possibility of nature. The product of a dedicated introspection, Silverman identifies the cliff of our current despair releasing a lightness of being that allows a tireless expansiveness to take over.

It is from the sanction of isolation reverberating simultaneously across the globe that we realize a compounded loss: the technologies that were supposed to liberate us have been transformed into the watchtowers of our own imprisonment. In the techno-sphere of isolated connectivity, Silverman reveals a primal landscape of longing for a shared environment, for a nature that emerges in splendour.