From Vince Aletti’s review of “Tearsheets,” currently on view at Baxter St. at The Camera Club of New York, for The New Yorker:
These pictures of pictures culled from seventies gay-porn magazines would fir right in at the Guggenheim’s current “Photo-Poetics” exhibition, alongside the work of Leslie Hewitt, Anne Collier, and Erica Baum. Like his older contemporaries, Silano refreshes familiar strategies of secondhand imagery, in his case by evoking memory, identity, and desire. The disco era and its aura of pre-AIDS hedonism is a touchstone in Silano’s erotic world, in which Bette Midler, contestants vying for the title of Mr. Christopher Street, and a host of anonymous nudes all appear. Nearly every collaged image is torn and fragmentary, as if recovered from a past that’s still too painful to look at head on.