Meet The People

Shelly Silver’s work emphasises the pleasures of story telling, utilising a wide range of different genres – from experimental to narrative to documentary – to explore issues of personal, cultural and political identity.
Blurring the line between documentary and fiction, truth and artifice, Meet the People presents fourteen ‘characters’ who face the camera in talking head close-ups and speak about their lives and dreams. The intimacy and honesty of their fragmented, ‘autobiographical’ storytelling is illusory; the credits reveal that these people are professional actors, playing fictional roles, reading a script.
The work points to the complicity on the part of the viewer in his desire to believe and identify with the traditions of and characters on TV. The same television that mimics a perfected form of identity of the ‘average person’ is also in part responsible for creating this identity; it both researches, uses and manufactures this ‘average person’s’ hopes and dreams. And so the question of the existence of a ‘real’ person becomes ‘real’ compared to what?