current: Barbara Weissberger  Potato Poems

ADA Gallery presents Potato Poems, an ongoing exhibition by Pittsburgh artist Barbara Weissberger. The exhibition has expanded to include a new installation of photographs from her series All The Time Not In The World.

Weissberger turned to the potato as a stand-in for the body — humble, lumpy, global, bound to survival. Its skin, flesh, and eyes speak a bodily language of earthiness and vulnerability. Food, she notes, is never outside of economies, even when homegrown or foraged.

At the center of Potato Poems are textile works that exist somewhere between image and sculptural object. Each functions as a kind of body: present without being literal. Weissberger begins with staged photographs — embedded directly into the work, printed on poly poplin or translated into woven tapestry — which are then cut and sewn together with salvaged materials. These include fragments of worn jeans bearing the imprint of bodies that once inhabited them, along with other textiles. With irregular contours suggesting movement and instability, the resulting assemblages emphasize touch, wear, and intimacy, embedding traces of lived experience directly into the fabric of the work.

Joining the fabric works is a selection of photographs from All The Time Not In The World, an ongoing series begun during the pandemic years. Each photograph, titled with its date, documents what Weissberger calls a "precarious stack" or "absurdist joke" — a transient arrangement made at a pace of no more than one per day, from whatever was at hand. The series reflects on attachment, absence, and the lives of things beyond our use of them.

The title comes from Margaret Atwood, quoted by Ali Smith: the photograph, like a mirror, stops and stretches time — the viewer's gaze dissolves the surface between art and life, and artist and viewer share "all the time not in the world."

Weissberger is a Guggenheim Fellow whose work has been shown at The Drawing Center, PS1/MoMA, White Columns, The Mattress Factory, Silver Eye, and the Missoula Art Museum, among others. She has been in residence at Yaddo, MacDowell, Camargo, Bogliasco, Ucross, the Ragdale Foundation, the Hambidge Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. 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, holds an M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute, and divides her time between Pittsburgh, New York, and Montana.