MICHELLE WEINBERG
SELECTIONS FROM SOMETHING VAST
Apr 13 | Jun 17, 2018
Selections
From Something Vast is an installation of recent graphite drawings
and boxed arrangements of papier maché objects. The works shown
demonstrate how Weinberg accommodates the maddening and inspiring
accumulation of images and things in contemporary life. To paraphrase
the designer Ettore Sottsass, she discovers value in a wasteful
society by involving herself in the symbolic and spiritual meaning of
useful things.
The
small graphite drawings are a product of transit. They are the
artist's travel papers, accompanying her on planes and car trips, a
dossier she packes with her. They record characters and episodes from
the moving stream of inspirations that comes from thoughts,
observations of her environment, images from magazines, art and
objects viewed in galleries and museums, friend's studios, from books
she is reading, online researches and via social media. They are
diaristic in their compulsive link to her lived experience. Their
subjects are storefronts and vines, interiors and clothing, paintings
and architecture, stage-y landscape, signs and billboards, an
eccentric and abstracted scenography.
The
papier maché works are the most recent iteration of her ongoing
project called Shelf Life. They are composed of found packages and
vessels, recycled for everyday use. Their branded messages are
sometimes replaced with new banalities such as "Win" or
"New", but most often their surfaces are coated with color
relationships and geometric compositions. The familiar forms of some
of the products co-exist with their new appearances, and in this way
the artist collaborates with the layers of social veneers that we
interact with in real life. Like dioramas, toy and gift sets, candy
or perfume assortments, generic product and souvenirs, these works
are alternately valueless and fetishized. They speak to the consumer
lust for beauty, vitality and allure. They are coveted and bought
home to become part of personal rituals. One of the sources for these
boxed sets is the Chinese tradition of burning paper replicas of
everyday personal items at funerals and tomb sweeping ceremonies. For
Weinberg, they involve her in the ephemeral nature of things and
human life, and the questionable longevity of shelf life - or of
posterity, the afterlife of art.
Michelle
Weinberg is a painter who creates art for surfaces, interiors,
architecture and public spaces. She received her BFA from School
of Visual Arts in NYC and her MFA from Tyler School of Art in
Philadelphia. She is the recipient of awards, fellowships and
residencies including a Creative Learning Grant from the Lower
Manhattan Cultural Council, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, a
South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship in Visual & Media
Art, an Individual Artist Fellowship and Artist Enhancement Grant
from the State of Florida, the National Foundation for
Advancement in the Arts, residencies at Mayer of Munich in Germany,
MacDowell Colony, Millay Colony, the Fine Arts Work Center in
Provincetown, homesession and Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain, and
Altos de Chavon in the Dominican Republic. Exhibitions of her work
include: FIU Frost Art Museum, the Wolfsonian Museum, design sublime
and Emerson Dorsch Gallery in Miami, Cyan Gallery in Barcelona,
Curatorial + Co in Sydney, The Hewitt Gallery at Marymount Manhattan
College and ARENA and Open Source in NYC, The Bob Rauschenberg
Gallery at Edison State College in Fort Myers, FL, The Schoolhouse
Gallery in Provincetown, MA and Islip Art Museum, NY. Commissions
include murals for The Wolfsonian Museum-FIU, Facebook offices in
Miami, Bay Parc Plaza Apartments in Miami
and Young at Art Museum in Davie,
public art projects for Miami-Dade County, City of Tampa, City of
Pembroke Pines, Cultural Council of Jacksonville, and City of
Hollywood, all in FL. Weinberg is Creative Director of Girls’
Club in Fort Lauderdale, and a consultant to museums and
non-profits, developing exhibitions, education programming and more.
