CHRISTINE WEIR: OSCILLATIONS

SOLO SHOW
APRL 19-MAY 18, 2024

OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 6-8PM

ARTIST TALK: SATURDAY, MAY 18, 2-3PM

IN CONVERSATION WITH CURATOR/GALLERY DIRECTOR SHANNON RAE FINCKE

The Middle Room is pleased to present Oscillations, a solo show of black and white abstract works made with graphite on clay board by LA-based artist Christine Weir. This exhibition will be on view from April 19-May 18, 2024.

Oscillations, is a powerful and contemplative one-woman show featuring meditative, intricately and time-consumingly made graphite drawings on a rich and beautiful clay surface that is embedded with deeply intellectual scientific inquiries and formed around both highly personal and universal themes of existence, evolution, anxiety, memory and transformation. Weir’s work explores the primary themes of space, time, matter, and consciousness. Informed by the technical rigor of her Bauhaus-inspired education and her own curiosity about the unquantifiable aspects of existence, her drawings are hand-built, detailed, and cumulative. She works within thematic narratives to create modular units within the context of gallery exhibits and as stand-alone pieces in private collections. Weir uses analog techniques to explore the varied territories between the material and immaterial. The intricate nature of of her work reveals the role of structures, patterns, and time in the study of our collective existence. Throughout her career, Weir’s work has explored voyeurism and paranoia, land-use issues and humanity’s impact on the environment, nuclear contamination, and emotional states. Using scientific data, images, and representations of geologic forms as starting points to study, Weir’s act of rendering expands their physicality, transforming the original subject into an otherworldly object meant for contemplation. The graphite drawing technique she has developed over the past eighteen years challenges the limits of the material, taking on metallic physical properties—the final product feels much more like a painting. She makes her drawings in order to activate discovery, enabling an exploration of questions about environment, consciousness, humanity, matter, and reality—our carbon-based selves are at once understandable and mysterious. Her artworks seek to interrogate that mystery and encourage unconventional approaches to procedural thinking. The pieces in this show delve into ideas around entropy and renewal, and how space, matter, and time shape our perceptions of reality. The starting point for Weir here is earth, specifically, water systems and lava flows. She transmutes these references into space-like objects of her own imagination. In some of these drawings she is exploring the passage of time, through moment, mystery, and quantification. Time can be a very specific record, a memory that can evoke joy, or a prison of perceived stagnancy—but it always brings change. In other drawings, Weir is depicting cataclysmic processes—think black holes and super novas. These are scary and wondrous things. And they naturally stand-in for those moments of change that afflict us in everyday life. Transformation through destruction abounds, and it is often an irreconcilable and horrible process. However, there can be power, beauty, and, sometimes, understanding formed in the aftermath of these events. This body of work was made to celebrate time, how it controls us, and how, while we can’t change what happens, we can flourish nonetheless.

Christine Weir creates abstract drawings and sculptural works grounded in personal and scientific inquiry that reflect the tension between matter, time, and the subjective experience of individual consciousness. Her modular graphite works, primarily on clay board, magnify and enhance the detail of geological topographies, becoming symbolic sites for introspection. Her themed collections of precise, hand-built works have been exhibited in solo and group shows throughout the United States. Unapologetically stark, dramatic, and personal, her exhibited and commissioned works are popular with private collectors throughout the US. Based in Los Angeles, Christine is an avid rock-climber and mother of a high school senior who will be studying art in college. Her formal education includes a BFA in Studio Art (Kutztown University of PA) and MS in Theory, Criticism, and History of Art, Design, and Architecture from Pratt Institute. While formal art training served as a strong foundation, she attributes her unique perspective about the creative process and art making to her near-decade-long career in the auction business, where she handled a vast and diverse amount of artwork. Christine combines her love of both theory and practice in her daily studio sessions.