Barbara Weissberger
Barbara Weissberger’s work has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, numerous artist residencies in the US and abroad including Yaddo, MacDowell, Camargo, Bogliasco, Ucross, the Ragdale Foundation, the Hambidge Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has been exhibited at such venues as The Drawing Center, PS1/MoMA, White Columns, Project Artspace, NYC; Catskill Artspace, Livingston Manor; Hallwalls, Buffalo; Gridspace, Brooklyn; Silver Eye, The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; ADA Gallery, Richmond; and The Missoula Art Museum, Missoula. Her work has been written about in journals including Femme Art Review and The Heavy Collective. She is part of the collaborative duo ALDRICH + WEISSBERGER. She received an M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute. She was born in New Jersey, lived in San Francisco and New York before moving to Pittsburgh. She divides her time between Pittsburgh, New York, and Montana.
“Each quilt is its own idiosyncratic shape and sits somewhere between image and sculptural object. Each quilt is a body of sorts, with an irregular contour suggesting movement and change. To make the quilts, my staged photographs are printed on poly poplin, or translated into woven tapestry, and are cut and sewn together with cut up jeans, which show the imprint of the bodies that wore them, cut up bras, and other materials. I came to the potato several years ago as I was looking for something bodily to photograph that was not a body, not my body. A still life subject that would act like a figure. A food as humble and lumpy as the body that consumes it. A food that speaks of earthiness, whose parts are called skin, flesh, eyes. Potatoes are pedestrian, a global staple. Potatoes are survivalist food. And food is never outside of economies even when home grown or foraged in an act of self-reliance or a desire to opt out or out of necessity. I remind myself of this as I arrange potatoes within the quiet of the studio where things seem freer and other values and uses may take hold. But what is at least as interesting to me as the connotations of tubers, is the humor of (the images of) potatoes and their weird relationship the other materials with which I place them. Potato and pantyhose. Potato and blue jeans. Potato and quilt patterns. How this weirdness and humor create a gap in meaning and that gap invites association, uncertainty, and the imaginal."
See Barbara's latest exhibition
Twenty Two Candles
THIS IS NOT A SOCK
Potato Poems
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