Rachel Mica Weiss “Liminal”

LMAKgallery

[Image: Rachel Mica Weiss "Fold I 2017" (detail) cast concrete, pigment, powder coated steel 30 x 69 x 26 in.]

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LMAKgallery presents Liminal, an exhibition by Rachel Mica Weiss in the gallery’s courtyard. The solo presentation of three new floor-based sculptures carries forward the artist’s process-based inquiry into boundaries, thresholds, and human capacity.

In each work, malleable, marble-like slabs pose on glassy, metallic plinths. These “stone” objects, whose surfaces swirl in un-stone-like colors, touch upon the uncanny, exhibiting the possibilities of fabric more than the permanence of inert earth matter. Scaled to the dimensions of Weiss’s own figure, these cast concrete objects are embodiments of the artist: she forms them by compacting and twisting the wet concrete and shoving her body into the material. Each sculpture’s stone—often used by the artist to stand in for the human body—peels up provocatively or slumps over, exhausted from the conditions of its own making.

These sumptuous yet simple surfaces are not necessarily to be believed; the artist toys with the materiality and immateriality of the objects themselves, upending our assumptions about their composition and capabilities. The polished surfaces of the pedestals emit a lightness that contravenes our beliefs about the weighty bodies they support—or perhaps conceal; these posed stone forms float over hazy doubles living within the non-space of the mirrored pedestal.

Weiss’s works exist at an intersection or threshold—activated/inert, rigid/pliable, alive/dead, real/facsimile. Each sculpture affirms the coexistence of such dualities, and each represents the liminal: the ambiguous point of transition from one stage to another, the point at which a restructuring occurs.

Rachel Mica Weiss (b. 1986) holds a B.A. from Oberlin College, an M.F.A. in sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute, and she is a 2011 recipient of the San Francisco Foundation Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship. Her solo exhibitions include Countermeasures at Montserrat College of Art, MA (2015), In Place at Fridman Gallery, NY (2014) and Engulfing the Elusory at the San Francisco Arts Commission (2013). Group exhibition venues include: Wayne State University, MI; BravinLee Programs, NY; Storefront Ten Eyck, NY; SOMArts Cultural Center, SF; and the Fiber Philadelphia Biennial, PA. Weiss has been commissioned to create permanent, large-scale installations for 1 Hotel and The Ashland in Brooklyn, NY; Handel Architects’ 525W52, NY; the U.S. Embassy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, through the State Department’s Art in Embassies Program; and the lobby of MediaMath’s 4 World Trade Center office. She has also created large-scale installations for Norwood, NY; Nassau Community College, NY; and PULSE New York, 2015. Her work has been reviewed in the Boston Globe and San Francisco Chronicle, and has appeared in Hyperallergic, Bad at Sports, and several international publications. Weiss lives and works in Brooklyn.