Artist Profile
Polish-born, based in New York City artist Monika Weiss creates environments that relate to the body and to the tension that characterizes specific relationship between biology and culture. In her drawings and multi-media installations, combined with performance and sound, Weiss explores physical properties of the act of drawing, which she combines with references to the ancient and medieval symbols and concepts of the world and the human being. Weiss uses her own body directly in her art as both the maker and the inhabitant of the artistic object.
In 2005 the artist was awarded a Philip Guston and Musa McKim Residency, YADDO, Saratoga Springs, New York. Her survey Monika Weiss: Five Rivers was organized at Lehman College Art Gallery, and Monika Weiss: Between Presence and Performative Memory was shown at the Instytut Sztuki WYSPA in Gdansk. Her installation Phlegethon-Milczenie will be presented this year at the Kunsthaus Dresden and at ArteBA, Buenos Aires. Weiss studied piano and musical composition in the Warsaw Conservatory for many years and continues to compose music for her work.
White Chalice (Ennoia), 2004 is an installation consisting of a video image of her curled-up body projected into a medieval baptismal font filled with water. It is as though she were back in the womb, about to be reborn, yet heavy with time. Or perhaps she is flirting with the dark glamour of death, and the nerve-racked promise of life on the other side.” (Benjamin Genocchio, “An Artist Whose Performance Delivers,” Art Review, The New York Times, December 18, 2005)
Ana Mendieta's Siluetas, recumbent female effigies made by bringing together, or taking away, natural elements particular to any outdoor site, an effigy left to disintegrate and return to the earth it was made from, exhibit a similar sense of slow-moving intensity as Monika Weiss's performances, a degree of artistic concentration which draws in every material nuance of the surroundings... The linking of drawing with the editing of video is another particular characteristic of Monika Weiss's work... The video image is not "of" her, but seems to arise from her own offering of herself, the result of some alchemy between the unmanned camera's “surveying, cold, motionless eye” (MW) and the emotion brought to the editing process. The birds-eye view serves to create a site, a space, separated from the rest of the environment, a graphic world.” (Guy Brett, “Time Being,” Five Rivers, Lehman College Art Gallery, 2005)
“In her work, the tremulous private body – her body and, by implication, my body – is best understood as a space in between, a permeable membrane held taut between two polarities in the personae of two Muses, Mnemosyne and Lethe (...) Weiss’ signature understanding of temporality bears a striking resemblance to that of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty: a sense of time as an institution, a system of equivalences with infinite interstices... Her large-scale drawings in a continuing series of harrowing representations of her own body in a curled-up or standing positions, invoke and provoke the reversibility which is integral to her manner of working, whatever the medium, and are always predicated on the medium of her own body as best conduit of expression and shifting shadow between the visible and the invisible, the seer and the seen.”
(James C. Campbell, “Drawing on Syncope: The Performativity of Rapture in the Art of Monika Weiss,” Five Rivers, Lehman College Art Gallery, and Galerie Samuel Lallouz, 2005)