ARTIST STATEMENT
My work is a sensual exploration of the ecological and indeterminate realities of identity and direct experience. It’s an expression of devotion to the sensuality of being that can open up a deeper connection to our humanity and by extension enhance our ability to humanize others. I’m interested in conjuring the electricity of eroticism, which I’ve come to define as a mystical absorption into a rhythmic and tender embodiment that arrives as swells of pulsating energy moving through our bodyminds. In this pursuit, I utilize the visual language of symbols, visions, and unraveling to create a woven world of talismanic art. Weaving and metalworking are my primary disciplines. Both are ceremonial and healing practices for me. I am drawn to the physicality required in both techniques and am interested in collapsing the dualities they represent. Whether it be hardness and softness, tension and release, masculinity and femininity, or rigidity and flexibility; I look to find the spaces where binaries can be transgressed. I am inspired by a diverse array of radical artists and scholars including the poets Adrienne Rich, Leonard Cohen, Rainer Marie Rilke, and Joy Harjo, the Queer scholars Audre Lorde, adrienne maree brown, Lex Morgan Lancaster, Jack Halberstam, and Judith Butler and the artists Guadalupe Maravilla, Louise Bourgeois, Leonore Tawney, Papa Ibra Tall, and Cecilia Vicuña. This upcoming fall I will be studying spinning with Jerry Bleem, exploring the possibilities of object based performance with Jade Yumang and Ann Wilson, and preparing work for my MFA thesis exhibition.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Based in Chicago, Adrienne Weiss is a multidisciplinary artist and educator whose practice is rooted in the understanding that corporeal awareness, research, ritual, dreams, activism, and art-making are interdependent phenomena that work together in service of personal and collective liberation. After many years as a self taught artist, Adrienne is now an M.F.A. candidate in Fiber and Material Studies and a recipient of the Pritzker Fellowship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She got her B.A. in Art History and American Studies at UC Berkeley in 2005 and was a Bay Area public school educator for 15 years. In 2022 she had a solo exhibition at Applied Contemporary Craft Gallery in Oakland, CA, the gallery of her mentor, Mary Catherine Bassett. She has also participated in a handful of group and juried shows including the June Steingart Art Gallery in Oakland, CA and Gallery Route One in Point Reyes, CA. This summer she was awarded a scholarship to participate in a study trip to Germany with artists and scholars Oliver Sann and Beate Geissler. She will also be showing work in the Surface Design Association exhibition “Interplay,” in conjunction with the Dairy Barn Arts Center in Athens, OH.
© Adrienne Weiss