Artist: Rachel Mica Weiss

CARVALHO PARK presents New York-based sculptor, Rachel Mica Weiss’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery, Cyclicalities. On the heels of her solo presentation at The Armory Show, New York, the artist presents an extended body of ambitious sculpture in the gallery’s newly expanded space at 112 Waterbury Street in Brooklyn, marking a significant moment in Weiss’s career and practice. Orbiting two figurally-scaled cast concrete sculptures with kinetic elements, Weiss’ meticulously hand-carved alabaster and marble sculptures utilize the motif of chain to address perceived notions of autonomy, boundaries, and confinement. The new series of sculpture is illuminated by the text below by art historian Elizabeth Buhe.

STRUCTURE, BESIEGED

ELIZABETH BUHE

What do Rachel Mica Weiss’s padlocked necklaces, chainmail capes, and rotating marble orbs have in common? Some hint at simple tasks a body might perform, like putting on, unlocking, or reposing. In this they recall the transitive and even performative nature of Richard Serra’s Verb List (1967) that enumerated actions the elder sculptor might take in making, most famously by flinging molten lead against the wall. “To scatter,” “to enclose,” “to repair,” “to rotate,” Serra wrote on his list. We might also note that Weiss’s marble chains are too large and too weighty to practically achieve the functions at which they hint, like protecting or constraining. Yet the problem with these action-based throughlines is that they reduce the sculptures to mere illustrations, and as a result they fail to grasp the sophistication of Weiss’s practice, now under development for twelve years.

Across the span of Weiss’s oeuvre, a throughline emerges that is more encompassing than the thematics of using or making a thing: her artworks offer inroads to consider how space has shaped and continues to shape ideas about the boundaries of the self and others, and how these conceptions relate to identity. For example, the work addresses the way boundaries such as shrouds, walls, and even shifts in our understanding about the structure of the universe have regulated behavior within the social sphere. Weiss critically examines how our conceptions of ourselves rely upon particular ideas about space as enclosed, leaky, or infinite, and they put under immense strain the fixity assumed by these models.

Weiss’s chainmail works are made of interlocked alabaster rings, and evoke coverings for the body. Like the warp and weft of woven textiles, there is a regularity to the appearance of one stone link connected to the next, and the repeating forms in the gaps between them. However, over and above this syncopated regulation, in this show Weiss has pushed the question of perforation further than ever before by beginning to disrupt the fixed logic of uniform repetition. Look at the lower registers of Protector V (Veil), for example, where the sculpture begins to unravel. The governing order breaks down, structure is besieged. The barrier leaks.

What—or who—is meant to be protected or contained by these shields, shrouds, and locks? Historically, the iconography of this subset of works within Weiss’s oeuvre pertains to men, who clothed themselves in armor in their capacity as warriors. The Old English word for man, wǣp(n)man, closely relates to the word for weapon, wǣpn, while the prefix wīf- refers to a woman, thereby correlating social roles with language.[1] Weiss’s works explicitly probe this connection to gender, even as, in their relative abstraction, they do not presuppose it. Indeed, it is precisely because of their ambiguity in this regard that the sculptures so effectively query how, historically, boundaries within our built landscape have related differently to the containment of male and female bodies.

Art historian Mark Wigley has shown, for instance, that the Renaissance polymath Leon Battista Alberti considered the female body and female sexuality as threats to the boundaries of architecture and patriarchy. Wigley points out that Alberti characterized women as overflowing and excessive: “unable to control herself, she must be controlled by being bounded” by the external law of architecture.[2] This notion relates directly to Weiss’s locks and keys, as well as to the fact that her chainmail works rely on the architecture from which they hang. Similarly, the poet and classics scholar Anne Carson has charted the history of women as leaky vessels whose voices threaten the dominant order.[3] These tales of power are one sided, of course. In Weiss’s work, the character of the barrier itself becomes a key to challenging these assumptions.

Identity in the history of Euro-American philosophy relies on an ideal self that is bounded, solid, housed, and based on a logic of spatial containment.[4] For Luce Irigaray, this constellation of beliefs about identity belongs to a masculine imaginary. Carrying forward the direction of the argument sketched above in which men strive to imprison women, what is missing, Irigaray says, is a consideration of identity based on fluidity. The self is not premised on an expulsion of the not-self from a clearly-bounded me, but through the interpenetration of the self with otherness.[5] This model of permeability is malleable to fit the forever changing flux of identity. Looking again at Weiss’s sculpture, the artist disrupts not just our expectation for the exact repetition of form as inherited from minimalist seriality, but also the conventional notion of the body as a closed system. Protector VII (Chamber), with its gaping abdomen, or Protector III (Hood) with its empty face, allude to any number of embodied conditions that confirm the fallacy of the self as unified and closed: self-identifying with a sibling or friend, the fragility of the psychological barriers we build around ourselves, or the experience of pregnancy.

We might consider this notion of selfhood as open to the flux of otherness a paradigm shift, because it radically disrupts the understanding of oneself as autonomous and contained within a bodily envelope. In his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn explained a paradigm shift as a radical break in scientific inquiry that replaces one prevailing framework with a new one. Kuhn had studied one of the most significant shifts in the history of Western knowledge: the Copernican Revolution of the sixteenth century, which replaced Ptolemy’s hypothesis of Earth as the center of the universe with Nicolaus Copernicus’s conclusion that the sun stood there instead, thereby causing a crisis in Europeans’ understanding of their place in the universe and in relation to God.

The shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric model of reality is doubly relevant to Weiss’s current exhibition. First, like the permeable model of selfhood that the chain works propose, the Copernican Revolution fundamentally de-centers the self, retooling assumptions of that self as whole and superior. Earth-bound people were suddenly—shockingly—no longer at the literal center of the universe. Second, the Copernican Revolution pertains directly to Weiss’s third and most recent body of work on view here: the freestanding rock sculptures of the In Time series that contain two bowling-ball-sized spheres of green marble embedded in their surfaces. These spheres are threaded with metal posts and, like celestial bodies, rotate due to motors hidden within. Not so coincidentally, Weiss presents these rock sculptures at the center of the gallery space. Her wall-hung works orbit around them.

Like the laws of attraction that govern how planetary bodies and human bodies relate to each other, Weiss’s new rock sculptures open a constellation of unresolved questions about relationships between sculpted components within a single work. How does one marble orb relate to its partner, or to the larger rock that holds it? In Time I contains two marble spheres that rotate towards each other at differing speeds, never seeming to connect. In Time II’s spheres roll towards one another like ever-swiveling eyes. The host rock suggests the vertical axis of a celestial or human body, the contours of its various faces melting into one another. What roles do proximity, touch, and absence play in defining one thing (or oneself) relative to another?

These hulking, pockmarked meteors stand in the gallery at nearly-human-height. They are actually scaled-up scholar stones, or rocks with naturally occurring holes prized for their irregular shapes. Weiss has cast them in concrete, and has accentuated several of their natural pits by embedding the marble orbs inside them. The irregularity of each rock’s surface craters and Weiss’s non-formulaic emphasis of certain pits by adding the marble balls provides a striking parallel to her chainmail works, which also employ a strategy of destructuring or disrupting normative expectations that humans impose on the universe.

The rock sculptures represent a promising direction in Weiss’s practice. What they evoke through abstraction—human bodies, planets, and the (perhaps era-defining shifts in) relations within these categories—suggests that ideas about our gendered selves as contained, separate, and self-reliant are permeable indeed. Weiss’s shaping of space does ideological work by gradually unraveling, as well as re-knitting, how we understand ourselves.

Rachel Mica Weiss (b. 1986, Maryland) is a sculptor and installation artist based in Upstate New York. Her work reconstitutes various boundaries—architectural, topographical, and psychological—to demonstrate their impact upon us. Her sculptures, often scaled to the human body, combine the visual language of textiles with the density of stone and cast forms—components that balance uneasily, vie for dominance, or are inextricably intertwined. Weiss’s work draws attention to the constraints within our physical and psychological spaces, asking us to reimagine those so-called barriers as flexible, passable, porous.

Weiss earned a BA in psychology from Oberlin College and an MFA in sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has been the subject of nine solo exhibitions at the following: CARVALHO PARK, New York (2024; forthcoming); Here, Pittsburgh (2022–23); Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh (2019); Lux Art Institute, San Diego (2018); LMAK Gallery, New York (2018, 2017); Montserrat College of Art, Beverly (2015); Fridman Gallery, New York (2014); and the San Francisco Arts Commission, San Francisco (2013). Weiss’ first institutional commission was The Wild Within (2020), at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Her largest permanent installation to date, Boundless Topographies, funded by the Gates Foundation, is installed at the University of Washington’s Hans Rosling Center for Population Health in Seattle, Washington. Weiss’ work is included in the public collections of the US Embassy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan; Microsoft Corporate Collection; Boston Consulting Group Corporate Collection; Media Math Corporate Collection; Sloan Kettering Memorial Cancer Center, Google, as well as the collections of Francis J. Greenberger and Beth Rudin DeWoody.

[1] “Man,” in Hoad, T.F., ed., The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), retrieved 18 July 2024 from ebook.
[2] Mark Wigley, “Untitled: The Housing of Gender,” in Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina and Jennifer Bloomer, Princeton Papers on Architecture 1 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), 335.
[3] Anne Carson, “The Gender of Sound,” in Glass, Irony, and God (New York: New Directions, 1995), 121.
[4] On the place of art in this narrative, see Amelia Jones, “Art as a binary proposition; identity as a binary proposition,” in Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification in the Visual Arts (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 17–62.
[5] Among other essays, see Luce Irigaray, “The ‘Mechanics’ of Fluids,” in This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 106–18.