issue 6: Flannery Silva (F.G.S.)
Discussed : weddings, nannying, apparatuses, Little House on the Prairie, The Parent Trap, poser tubes, Real Dolls, verse/chorus/verse, ambiguity, bonnets, websites, ballet slippers, fencing, fetish objects, etc.
Flannery Silva is always world-building, even when she isn’t making installations. She works in sculpture, text, music, images–often together. The different pieces speak to one another as part of a whole. Many of the images are familiar, pulled from a collective adolescent memory, but the whole thing is masked by a facade. When the mask slips, we catch a glimpse of the perverse possibilities below.
“Passions,” performed under the name F.G.S., appears to be her most straightforward presentation so far. It’s a breezy, pastoral country-tinged pop song. But, as with all of Silva’s work, something is off. In the opening line she sings, “Passions of a country girl in the valley of humiliation.” In the accompanying music video Silva poses for photographs half-nude, in and around an overgrown country shack, wearing a bonnet. We see glimpses of the pair of photographers; at one point, we even hear them. When Flannery sings “I’m the princess of this position,” she’s sitting on an old tractor with cartoon butterflies obscuring her nipples. Later, she reviews some of the images from the shoot on a laptop at an incongruously modern desk, still topless. The video gives us the idea of the country, but it continuously reminds us of the artifice involved. Flannery is the princess, but also the object of the camera’s gaze. “I know the devil’s coming here first,” she sings later. Even at the album’s most saccharine, there’s an ambiguous cloud looming.
Silva’s formative music project, Odwalla 1221/88, developed its own strange lexicon from bits of poetry, misheard phrases, and inside jokes. Flannery and her bandmate Chloe acted as human samplers, reciting their own insular language in precise monotone. Odwalla’s spare arrangements could feel confrontational, so there’s something particularly uncanny about hearing Silva’s warped turns-of-phrase in their new environment: smuggled into infectious pop-country songs.
We talked over the phone in August 2022.
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You’re a wedding planner?
Yeah, it’s my new strange career. I’ve been doing it for about a year now. My boss just made me business cards. It feels like a pretty natural progression from nannying for 10 years, in terms of being a weird roleplay gig that’s seamlessly on par with my interests. [Laughs] They’re jobs that I’m good at but also interested in in an identity way, like I’m an actress playing the part of the wedding planner. It’s a similar experience to how I prepare for a gallery show or a production of some sort, organizing all the props and dealing with a lot of different people. You also engage with a lot of people from Orange County and the Valley that I never really would otherwise. You enter a lot of different worlds, which is good research.
What’s the weirdest thing you’ve seen at a wedding?
The venue I work at seems to attract a lot of military families. At my last wedding the groom was a Navy Seal. It was interesting to facilitate a wedding with someone who belongs to such a secretive rank of the military. I thought they’d all be dressed in their regalia, performing rituals and stuff, but it ended up being very low key.
There’s a voyeuristic quality to being involved in a stranger’s wedding. Voyeurism seems like an aspect of some of your creative work, too. Does the day job feed into what you do creatively?
Yeah. When I was nannying I tried to interact in a way that informed my work without exploiting the intimacy of my relationships with those families. During that time I changed my Facebook name to Pinky Rose– an homage to Sissy Spacek’s character in Three Women–as a way for the family not to find me online. A couple years later I used that name for the covers project I did.
At that point I was also making a lot of work that had to do with the apparatuses of taking care of children, and maternal characters from literature and stuff. I think it helped me feed that work to actually be amongst those things. Most of the time I was working for people that had no idea who I was outside of the job, and I tried to keep it that way. If they saw my work they would’ve been like, “Um.... You can’t take care of my child anymore.” [Laughs]
[Laughs] I didn’t know about the nannying part, but that makes sense I guess. Has your art ever garnered any controversy for some of the themes you work with? Newborn imagery seems to overlap with sexual imagery, for instance.
Not that I’m aware of. Maybe I’m a considerate provocateur? I try to keep my work uncanny enough so as to not censor myself, by presenting things in an abstracted way. Five or six years ago I made a video to accompany a sculpture series called Gripper Bon. In the video I’m sitting on an exercise ball in the middle of a dressed up banquet hall. I have a bridal corset painted on me with body paint–painted by the artist Orion Martin–and I’m bouncing repeatedly on the ball making a “shushing” noise with my arms holding an imaginary baby. I feel like this is a good example of mining from my experiences in childcare, like putting a baby to sleep, and portraying it as a sort of eroticized performance.
I was a little hesitant to do an interview, because I think the ambiguity is important, and I’m always wary of infringing on that a bit...
For sure, me too.
...but I ended up thinking, “Well , I guess thats up to her to maintain, not me.” It’s a delicate thing, though.
I’m at a crossroads. For a while I’ve had a wall up in terms of engagement, trying to keep things very vague. But I think it’s important to dissect, too. You might ask questions I never would’ve thought of.
The new record seemed like it came out of nowhere. How long have you been working on it?
I made a covers album under the Pinky Rose name probably seven or eight years ago. I covered artists like Lucinda Williams and Liz Phair and Algebra Suicide, and I collaborated with a couple of friends who helped me with the instrumentals. I made a CD, and that was the first solo thing I ever did, and it was simultaneous to being in the band with Chloe. [Odwalla 88 / Odwalla 1221]
Later I did a couple more covers for an art show in Brooklyn called Teardrop Trainer. The songs were synced to a light show basically, so every time a song was over all the bright fluorescent gallery lights would come on, but when a song was playing all the bright lights would go off, and spot lights would flicker to the song, illuminating the centerpiece sculptures. I worked on those songs with my friend Chase Ceglie, who’s a composer/musician from Rhode Island.
During peak COVID I moved to RI for eight months and lived on the ocean with my boyfriend in this cheap offseason rental, and I was eager to start challenging myself by writing original songs. I started to dissect some of my old writing and poetry from 2013, taking that writing apart, and I reconnected with Chase who taught me more about song structure in a pop-country way. As soon as I understood the basics it really allowed me to write better and more efficiently. I’d go to his house once a week. We wrote the songs in maybe four months. That was last year, and I’ve been kinda sitting on them, figuring out what the visual components need to be. But it did happen pretty quickly, in the scheme of things.
You mostly operate in a fine art setting, and when Odwalla was playing it was happening in an underground, or avant-garde, context. Do you think of this album as something that might exist in the realm of a broader pop culture?
To me it’s definitely an extension of how I think about putting on an art exhibit. There’s the sculpture, the photography, and then some kind of sound and lighting element. It’s definitely still in that world of making objects that are in conversation with the music. But also it’s an attempt at not relying on the limitations of the gallery. The life of releasing music feels more sustaining and interesting. It’s not like a show that just happens and then comes down. It feels more sustainable, putting it on streaming services and making videos. I’m down for it to exist in a more pop way, and the fact that I’m trying to make more pop country music will maybe allow for that. It’s more accessible than some of the other things I’ve done.
Are you thinking about an audience at all when you’re working?
We have such a bubble of an audience, and we’ve had that for a long time. So automatically I think about that. But for something like this, which is a little bit different, I would like it to reach a little further than my internal crew. That’s what’s cool about music–it can travel a little faster in terms of accessibility, and I can still get the visual components of making art. It’s like a package deal. Instead of showing sculptures in a space, I’m excited to incorporate and interact with them in the videos and cover art so they can live a little longer.
It’s cool imagining hearing the lyrics on the radio. They become more subversive in that context. Infiltrating something bigger...
That’s cool, yeah. I still kept the lyrics freaky, but some of them are said in a way that’s more melody-driven and earwormy. Within that structure you can get away with more in terms of lyrical subjects. It’s a soft way of saying a hard thing.
Repetition is one of the main tools you used in Odwalla. Was it hard to shift gears to a less repetitive form?
Saying that stuff with Chloe felt a lot more powerful than saying it alone. Certain structures that Chloe and I created worked really well together with our languages and sentiments converging. There are parts throughout the songs on this new album that are a little spoken-wordy, or said with a bit of an attitude or cadence that feels very taken from Odwalla. So there’s some of that flavor, for sure.
Like I said, it was really a switch that flipped when I learned the basics of verse/chorus/verse, like that. As limiting as it can be, it felt really expansive on a writing level, because I could organize my thoughts more easily, as someone who feels like such a novice to writing music.
Is it important to keep finding realms where you can be a novice when you work in a lot of different mediums? Does that keep the momentum going?
I love to dabble in materials or practices. I’m less interested in becoming a master of one thing and more into getting tools from each thing to incorporate into what I’m making. For instance, I started working with a mold maker to make more permanent sculptures from resin and plastics. He’s always like, “I can teach you how to do this,” and I’m like, eh, I don’t have time for that. I like the relation- ship. It’s like a collaboration, but also a kind of magic that happens when I build something for months and months and then I drop it off and it becomes transformed. I’m learning a lot from Chase and other people, but I’m not necessarily interested in mastering the piano, you know? I love dabbling and the kind of collaboration that comes from someone who is a master wanting to help me realize my seemingly unattainable ideas.
You seem pretty prolific. Are you always kind of working on a few different things?
I’m the kind of maker who’s definitely always brewing ideas and working on something gradually. I just finished this sculpture that’s an oversized beer stein, like a large mug. It took me almost a year to sculpt it out of clay, and I had it made into a mold and cast in resin. That, for instance, required me to be in the studio for six hours a day, numerous days a week. When it’s a real physical handbuilt thing there’s a different level of attention. Versus planning some kind of photo shoot, which is a lot of to-do lists and research and mood- boards, and getting people together. So, prolific? I don’t know. But I have a hard time not working.
I have to confess an ignorance to some of the sources you pull from, especially stuff that’s really specific to girlhood. How important is it to have experience with those images in order to access what you do?
I think there’s been iconography from obscure-ish pop culture or TV or literary references I’ve pulled from that aren’t necessarily important to know the origin of or know the plot. Sometimes I use them as an avatar, or to pull some feeling or reference from and then mirror onto an object or an image. The new music is littered with references ranging from Shakespeare to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s not necessary to get the reference, but if you do, I’m sure it hits harder. But yeah, I’m definitely a reference-head, so that’s the way I communicate and create.
It’s definitely a recurring group of references, too. When I first started making sculptures and images I was pretty heavy into Little House on the Prairie and dissecting that world. The new music uses bits I wrote based on that. A while ago I transcribed the dialogue from the Little House TV show using YouTube’s closed captions. The closed captions did a really bad job, and it was really poetic. I’ve incorporated quotes from that into my work throughout the years. There’s also a weird internet hole about a banned episode where one of the characters gets raped. It became controversial. A while ago I found an old website that transcribed the whole episode and included screen grabs. There’s a lyric from that ep in one of my new songs where I say, “Sylvia is in the woods picking flowers...”. There are a lot of moments like that throughout my work. Even if they’re taken from completely different eras or generations, I see them having a relationship and belonging in the same space.
A lot of the imagery that you play with seems to reemerge later as a main- stream aesthetic trend or fixation. Do you think about that at all?
Yeah, I mean, the bonnet thing was cringe to see, because I was on the bonnet wave pretty early. [Laughs]
Bonnet wave, yeah.
[Laughs] Yeah, bonnets have been an important motif for me. I think it sort of started with Laura Ingalls Wilder/ Little House and then seeped into my other interests and fantasies, like pushing a baby stroller with a canopy and instantly thinking of bonnets, modes of concealing. I made large scale suspended bonnet sculptures out of baby stroller canopies and reconstructed Playboy Bunny Halloween costumes. I used to see bonnets in everything. Like, an awning on a building was a bonnet to me.
I’m protective of my references, so when the articles started coming out about bonnets I was like, “Oh God...” Not that I felt I was being forgotten about in the bonnet history, or that my style was being jocked. [Laughs] It’s ultimately just a reinforcement of the hive mind, that these things have a cycle of interest. These things exist and are shared, so it’s always gonna happen. Were there any other specifics you were thinking of?
No, I think you addressed it. In some ways I would guess those trends might provide a new key for the random person to access what you do. Which could be cool. But yeah, also bizarre.
Yeah. And the way my website is structured, it’s pretty vague in terms of dates and timelines. I don’t want people to think I’m late to the game. [Laughs] I need to show my bonnet receipts.
I’m glad you brought up the website. It’s great, because the user can actually access some of these installations. A lot of times if you miss the exhibition, you missed it. Instead, the website becomes part of the world-building you do, in a way that still maintains some of its mystery.
Sometimes I feel like the actual physical space doesn’t really achieve what can be achieved on a webpage. I can tell the story better on Romantica1fem. There’s more control in terms of mood and formatting, and I have more freedom to share the footnotes or supplemental materials. The works added to my website are chronological but it doesn’t really matter, it exists as one cohesive maze. It feels more immersive and intuitive for me to make a webpage then to set up objects in a physical space. I like the fact that an object can travel from space to space, but it’s forever immortalized on the web.