REBECCA WEISMAN
Artist Statement
I am a conceptually driven, project-based artist working at the intersection of moving image and sculpture. I can most often be found in my studio experimenting with materials and crafting sculptures as props for videos, or filming on site in collaboration with a diverse array of people and environments. My work explores nature, memory, reenactment, and the real, as well as the body and its messy relationship to the unconscious. I have twenty years of experience producing time-based installations and films, often in unlikely venues and locations (the Oregon desert, vacant urban buildings, a Vermont mountaintop, my own home) as well as for more traditional gallery settings.
My recent video installation work juxtaposes a found image, story, or event with an artist’s reenactment. The video reenactments take on a mythical status, with fantastical sets and bodily performances that draw on the artifacts found in the original event. These films are then deconstructed and embedded back into or on top of sculptural forms, creating dreamy installations with overlapping layers of visual narrative. My installations move the viewer back and forth between the 2-dimensional screen or projection and the 3-dimensional space of the sculptural objects, blurring the line between forms and posing questions about originality. These visceral installations draw the viewer into a magical mythology that reveals my deep care for the unconscious and how it spills out through the messiness of the body and in nature. From the tactile and experiential, to the intellectual and spiritual, the audience can glean their own narrative adventure through physical materials, image, and sound.
I am currently working on two new bodies of work that are pushing me towards a deepening sculptural practice. The first is a revisiting of Skin Ego, an installation started in 2019, of sculptural objects and films recreating an image of a whale dissection, exploring the role of skin as a physical and psychic container. The original installation centered on an 8X20' recreation of the skin of a whale with my own reenactment films embedded inside, alongside other props from my performance of the event. I am currently developing new large-scale “skins” made from cast latex, nylon, and steel.
The second project is a work in progress called Mother Island, a three-part film installation about mothering, imagination, and being stranded, using my own children and the collaborative sculptures we created during the pandemic. Each part of the film juxtaposes footage from the 1960’s of a group of boys who survived being stranded on an island for 15 months, with my own reenactment of the 15 months of lockdown that I experienced with my children. Replete with magical cardboard houses, a boat on wheels, movement performances and years’ worth of drawings and sculptures all co-created by me and the children, Mother Island draws on the praxis of love labor and discourses of care.
In both projects I am looking at ways of furthering my investigation into materials, physical forms, and the physicality of the body. I am interested in refining techniques that push the sculptures into more finished forms while still retaining their special qualities as “props” and exploring this tension. At a time when we are being overwhelmed by advances in technology I'm interested in returning to the meaning of the human touch, the caring process that an object goes through both in the making and in the ritualized performance of it, and the way that video can document or play a role in this ritual, creating a synergistic dialogue with the physical, rather than overwhelming it.