NADA X FORELAND

RACHEL MICA WEISS

ON VIEW AUG. 28 + 29, 2021

FORELAND, 111 WATER STREET, CATSKILL, NY 12414

CARVALHO PARK is thrilled to show with the New Art Dealers Alliance in this coming weekend’s NADA X Foreland exhibition in Catskill, New York. The gallery will present two sculpture installations by New York-based artist, Rachel Mica Weiss, in Foreland’s 5th floor penthouse, among its colossal 85,000 sq ft space. The exhibition will be on view Sat. + Sun., Aug. 28 + 29, from 11AM – 8PM.

Rachel Mica Weiss’ new sculptural works utilize the formal motif of chains to unpack the relationship between physical and psychological vulnerabilities. Created at an out-sized scale, and in luminous, translucent and gradating shades, the works supersede the utility of the links of which they are comprised — and into a surreality and sublimity, suggesting that the barriers and restraints may be transcended.

Chain is dually restrictive and cooperative — its structure dependent on the cooperation of many links working in tandem. These new works explore chain’s twin nature, suggesting through forms that drape, hang limply, or fail at being complete barriers, that static entities are flexible and materials’ capabilities illusory — mental constructs may be reformed and power structures overturned. These sculptures manifest our own formless, but powerful, mental constructs: the pressure of expectations, the weight of guilt, or the complex web of power dynamics.

Extending beyond its inherent purpose, the chain in Kneeler II (2020) becomes a stand-in for the body itself. Calling upon these formal tropes of encircling chains and draped figural forms, Weiss’ works are often feminine and feminist in nature, negotiating the line between adornment and entanglement, brunt and malleability. The work engages in uncertain relationships — entities vie for dominance, are inextricably intertwined, or are weighted down in the expression of our complex, inner psychological spaces.

When one stands before Passage (2020) — the second of the two works on view — the chain rests at chest height, like a larger-than-life glass necklace aching for a body, and calling upon the viewer as its subject, its body to adorn. Suspended between thin tendrils of chain, the work seems to bar passage like a stanchion bisecting the room, but it is essentially without effect without its counterpart — the viewer — the possible figure to don this ineffectual adornment.

NADA X Foreland

In partnership with Upstate Art Weekend, and co-organized with NADA Member Jesse Greenberg of JAG Projects, the exhibition will highlight artworks from the community of NADA galleries, non-profits, and artists with a focus on artists and exhibition spaces working in the region of Upstate New York, featuring 81 exhibiting galleries, non-profits, and artist-run spaces presenting over 100 artists.

Rachel Mica Weiss (b. Rockville, MD, 1986) is a sculptor and installation artist based in 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, an MFA in sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is the recipient of: an Investing in Professional Artists Grant from the Pittsburgh Foundation and The Heinz Endowments (2020) and a San Francisco Foundation Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship (2011); she was named a Hopper Prize finalist (2019). She has been invited to the Fountainhead Residency, Miami, FL (2020), funded by the Heinz Endowments; 100 W Corsicana Artist and Writer Residency, Corsicana, TX (2020), funded by a Navarro Council for the Arts Grant; Lux Art Institute Residency, Encinitas, CA (2018); and Marble House Project Residency, Dorset, VT (2015), among others.

Weiss has been the subject of seven solo exhibitions at the following venues: Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA (2019) ; Lux Art Institute, San Diego, CA (2018); LMAK Gallery, New York, NY (2018, 2017); Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA (2015); Fridman Gallery, New York, NY (2014); the San Francisco Arts Commission, San Francisco, CA (2013). Weiss has created public artworks for venues worldwide, including for the US Embassy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan; Airbnb, Seattle, WA; and The Pittsburgh International Airport.

Her first institutional commission, The Wild Within, is now on view at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA. Her largest permanent installation to date, Boundless Topographies, funded by the Gates Foundation, was recently installed at the University of Washington’s Hans Rosling Center for Population Health in Seattle.

Weiss’ work is included in several public and private collections such as: the US Embassy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan; Microsoft Corporate Collection; Boston Consulting Group Corporate Collection; Media Math Corporate Collection; Sloan Kettering Memorial Cancer Center, as well as the collections of Francis J. Greenberger and Beth Rudin deWoody.