Rachel Mica Weiss — Fountainhead

Pittsburgh, PA

January 15-February 29th, 2020

ARTIST STATEMENT

The process of weaving, part of my early training, significantly structures my material research and sits at the heart of my intellectual and artistic inquiries. My research on weavings’ relationship to architecture, and its historical use as a means to divide, control, and gender space, figures significantly in my site-specific installations and architectural interventions, which employ processes I’ve developed from weaving.

Within their constructed environments, and the wider context of our increasingly human-made and -molded world, my installations shape, divide, and harness architectural space. For example, my “Topographies” works reinstate the topographies surrounding their sites inside their buildings’ rectilinear atriums, blurring the boundaries between inside and outside; my “Arches” series upends the ubiquitous Romanesque arch, voiding it of strength.

In both my sculptures and installations, I use my materials—commonplace, yet culturally gendered and embedded with history—to highlight the architectural structures that shape us and the ways that we shape our environment. Combining textile languages with the density of stone, cast forms, and wood constructions, I create microcosms of tension contain components that balance uneasily, vie for dominance, or are hopelessly intertwined, bringing questions of relative strength, gravity, balance, and value to the fore. Within each sculpture, I manipulate materials in unlikely ways, juxtaposing seemingly fluid wood forms against lava-like cast "rocks," confusing cast objects, stone, and foam. By confounding the slippery connotations of formal and material characteristics, I hope to unravel the “stable” preconceptions of wet-dry, heavy-light, strong-fragile.

Our contemporary moment is marked by rigid boundaries that constrict us rather than connect us. By pointing to the structures that house us using methods derived from weaving, I highlight their porosity, suggesting that the walls we build are passable. My aim, in all of my works, is that barriers—real, self-imposed, and imaginary—are set askew.

BIO

Rachel Mica Weiss (b. Rockville, MD, 1986) is a sculptor and installation artist based in Brooklyn and Pittsburgh. Her work reconstitutes various boundaries--architectural, topographical, and psychological--to demonstrate their impact upon us. Her sculptures and installations draw upon textiles’ historical use as a means to divide and control space.

Weiss earned a BA in psychology from Oberlin College, an MFA in sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute, and is a 2011 recipient of the San Francisco Foundation Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship. Weiss has been the subject of seven solo exhibitions at the following venues: Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA; Lux Art Institute, San Diego, CA; LMAK Gallery and Fridman Gallery, New York, NY; Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA; and the San Francisco Arts Commission, San Francisco, CA.

Weiss has been commissioned to create permanent, site-specific installations for: the US Embassy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan; Airbnb, Seattle, WA; Brookfeld’s One Allen Center in Houston, TX; 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge, NY; The Ashland in Brooklyn, NY; and MediaMath’s 4 World Trade Center office, among others. Current public art projects include installations for The Pittsburgh International Airport and, in collaboration with the Gates Foundation, the University of Washington’s Public Health Initiative.

ARTIST LINKS

Website: rachelmicaweiss.com

Instagram: @rachelmicaweiss