WE ARE SO NERVOUS WE ALMOST LOOK CALM
Barbara Weissberger
11.4.22-11.25.22
Opening Reception | Friday, November 4: 6-9pm
In partnership with Dismal Niche and the Columbia Experimental Music Festival
Featuring a new sound piece by Tony Irons
In We Are So Nervous We Almost Look Calm, Weissberger combines elements of collage, sculpture, and photography to stitch together an altered understanding of space, time, and body. Her playful and precarious scenes weave between two-dimensional and three-dimensional realities and challenge the conventions of the picture plane.
The expansive photographic textile piece (and the namesake for the show) is an intersection of self-portrait and still-life, body and object, and private and public space. Its quilt-like form is irregular, yet familiar, existing in the margins between the functional and nonfunctional. The body is a staged presence as the artist performs for the camera—grasping, touching, and clutching everyday objects. The self-portrait is cut, pieced, and visibly sewn with swaths of the domestic. Dissected fragments of body and object are indistinguishable from one another—a pantyhose-outstretched arm acting like the extended electrical cord. Private surfaces of bodily and domestic skin become public—an invitation to passersby to look, feel, and consider their own bodies. And yet, the works are paced by the hands of the maker. The textile piece is a slow, meticulous labor, while the photographs are more impulsive and urgent. Photographed still-lives of home and studio objects are assembled into “precarious stacks” which exist as both an exercise in color and form, as well as an allusion to time and a lack thereof.
The joy in Weissberger’s work can be found in its ability to arrange and rearrange, to reconfigure objects and environments and even itself. And yet this constant state of making and remaking also creates tensions—a nervous laughter. When do we rest? How do we know? Or maybe, as the work proposes, we just keep moving.
Barbara Weissberger was born in New Jersey, lived in San Francisco and New York, before moving to Pittsburgh where she is currently based. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, numerous national and international residencies and fellowships including MacDowell, Yaddo, Ucross, VCCA, Camargo and Bogliasco, and the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions. Her work has been shown at such venues as Silver Eye (solo), Pittsburgh; PS1/MoMA, LIC; Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center (solo), Buffalo; The Drawing Center, New York; The Mattress Factory, and Contemporary Craft, Pittsburgh; ADA Gallery (solo), Richmond; Artspace New Haven (solo); Gridspace (solo), Brooklyn; DUMBO Art Center, Brooklyn; Whitespace, Atlanta; and The Missoula Art Museum. Recent collaborations include Counterpointe, Brooklyn; Commabox v. 3 (collaborative artists' book); and an upcoming collaboration with Staycee Pearl Dance Project & Soy Sos. She is half of the ongoing collaboration ALDRICH+WEISSBERGER. Her improvisational photographs, textile works, and soft sculptures are concerned with bodies, humor, and sensation.
