Hilary Harp + Suzie Silver

Since 2002 Hilary Harp and Suzie Silver have been romantic and creative partners. Their videos, installations and media performances celebrate experimental and counter-hegemonic aesthetics including camp, psychedelia, folk art and science fiction. Since 2014 Harp and Silver have been developing “Fairy Fantastic!” a platform for the production and presentation of queer folk and fairy tales and queer films for all-ages audiences. Fairy Fantastic! advances their commitment to an opulent “cinema povera” in which magical effects are achieved with minimal means. Their hand-crafted, seams-showing illusions combine practical and digital special effects to create a knit-together image in sync with themes of hybridity, metamorphosis, and the disruption of binaries. Through curated screenings of queer folk and fairytales and experimental and gender-creative films for all ages, Fairy Fantastic! is building a network of non-mainstream, gender-non-conforming all ages audiences. Aspects of Fairy Fantastic! have screened nationally at venues including Pittsburgh Filmmakers, the 2018 Carnegie International
Cinematheque, Anthology Film Archives, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Andy Warhol Museum, and at international festivals including in Belarus, UK, Uganda, Portugal, Romania and Australia.
In their twelve-year collaboration prior to Fairy Fantastic! Harp and Silver created a wide range of internationally visible projects. Their first collaboration was Untitled Landscapes (2003) and The Happiest Day (2004), a series of video view-boxes and a single channel video exploring nostalgia for the NYC performance art scene of the 1960s and ‘70s. In 2007 they completed Nebula an installation of sculpture and photographic light boxes paired with a single channel video exploring modernist visual culture and space. From 2007-2010 they developed Fruit Machine an interactive media performance that generated a number of single channel videos including Robot Love, and Eric Moe’s Idyll. In 2012 they completed the single channel video, Obligate Symbionts of Colobus Grand for Silver’s book/dvd Strange Attractors: Non-Humanoid Alien Sex. Their videos have screened at hundreds of festivals on five continents and are distributed by the Video Data Bank.
Suzie Silver has been creating queer performance and video art for more than two decades. Her well-known early videos, Freebird and A Spy emerged from her involvement with the cabaret performance art scene in Chicago in the late 80’s and early 90s and are considered canonical works of queer video art. Hilary Harp creates sculptures, installations and media projects which explore new hybrid forms and challenge categories of high and low, male and female, technology and craft. Harp has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a Heinz Foundation Creative Heights Grant and two Arizona Commission on the Arts Research Grants. Harp is Associate Professor in the School of Art at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ.  Silver is Professor of Electronic and Time-based Art at Carnegie Mellon University.