February 1, 2012

Drawings from Inside My Outer Space

February 10-March 18, 2012

William Busta Gallery, Cleveland, OH

From the brochure essay: What flesh sustains through the void

Julie Weitz’s work asks just what the body is, as it is lived, as it hovers in the slide of the concrete and the digital, the ecstasies of math, sound and chemical. Within each of her assemblages are points, triangles and triangulations, rhythms, circles and rivulets, and body parts, as images represented, as texture and material. All of this is about the body: it is the body that is engaged in all these geometry-meat machines, the body that makes the matter of the work, and that the work addresses. The assemblage is the body, twined in a voided space, but both lie on the viewer’s eye.

The body—your body—is not a human-shaped visual form in the distance. It barely has a head, or barely has a torso; what’s there, what’s not, in your body, as your body, pulses from moment to moment. Now you are your back contracting. Now you are your breath. Now you are a wave of pleasure. Now you disappear. Time and touch scorch pivots in the body that you live, secrete a scaffolding upon which its surfaces stretch, re-stretch, across which they expand or implode. In between these points are zones of transformation or sustain. Consider a yoga position. The hands here, the tailbone so, the breathing flowing thus. Or consider being seated at the computer. The mind here at the edge of the message; the hands vanished, the spine a distant wall. The body
is in space, a physical space, but it also has its own space. These spaces overlap, but not on a single plane, and not all at once; only through a pulse, a shiver of delight or dread. And out therein the physical there’s that virtual expansion too, the sprint of space into the internet; the rush of three dimensions into four, five, zero. We pursue our own coordinates by flying madly away. Then distance begins to fold.

At the screen, in the panting clutch of sound, under the tongue of the lover, there is an oscillation. In becomes out, out in, one moment becomes the next. At the surface that is drawn, printed, stacked, glued; there where the eye meets point, angle, nipple, eye: that is where this attraction/repulsion occurs. Just where two alleged objects meet their objecthood slips away and in its place there is a self-aware yet ever-so-skittish tangle. That is what these collages are about. What is collaged is not only the gouache, the photographic paper, the graphite, but the body itself; the body is/as (the) material. The body from without, its strange continuity with the camera lens and gestures of edit; the body from within, as space in space, density in density. Each separation breathes a substance, the heat of the shadow beneath the breast
or the curved, pectoral-deltoid insistence. How you move is in what you see: communion flickers between what you want and where you are and what you merely perceive.

Nipples, breasts, bellies, eyes—evoke a certain eros. But a harsher eros acts on them, grids them off and locks them into some one place with some one meaning. It sprays out points, collects and connects them, locks the circle in the shard, draws the razor over the retina. Geometry captures the eye; the nipple presses against measure. What pulses between these two dimensions of eros? What flesh sustains through the void? It is both that the body is subsumed in the immaterial and that the virtual runs
with blood.

—Matt McGarvey

Matt McGarvey is a theorist and artist living in Los Angeles, CA.

September 4, 2011

Vertical Hold: Iva Gueorguieva and Julie Weitz

September 9-October 15, 2011

Electric Works Gallery, San Francisco, CA

This two-person exhibition is the culmination of an unfolding visual dialogue between artists Iva Gueorguieva and Julie Weitz, as each considers the  relationship between time, body and painting.  In this exchange of influence, Gueorguieva takes on Weitz’s reoccurring theme of the mask and existentially rich nature of the reflection, and Weitz adapts Gueorguieva’s implied figuration and propensity for vertical structure. The two artists encounter each other in their insistence on the body as both subject and field, and their consideration of time in the experience of looking.


October 15, 2010

Review: Creative Loafing by Megan Voeller

"Weitz taps into the unbreachable gap that we span every time we encounter another human being — the sensation of being at once pulled into and pushed away from someone we can never fully apprehend."

July 30, 2010

Feature: Beefmaster Magazine

"In these new drawings, the mask becomes optically illusive, politically deflated and unpredictably simple."

June 16, 2009

Interview with Gregg Perkins

Interview excerpt from Who Will Guard the Guards: A Catalog of Masked Portraits, 2009.  Catalog is available by request.

GP: Your new works straddle the line between figuration and abstraction while also remaining in close dialogue with contemporary political issues—and all of this without slipping into a reductive evaluation of such loaded imagery. These oppositions seem to be weighed equally throughout the works, which leads me to my first question. While you are working squarely within the idiom of portraiture, you are also obscuring—or negating—the specific identity of the subjects wearing the hoods. Along these lines, how does the idea of literal representation operate within your work?

JW: From the beginning, the choice to deal with media-based images in my work, images that were synonymous with the “War on Terror,” caught me in a predicament. How could I evoke a new way of seeing an image that was already so loaded, obvious and overstated? And yet the impulse to work with an image like the headscarf or terrorist mask was to confront the issue head-on, to complicate a way of seeing something that had been reduced to an ideological slogan.  

In the process of making the work, I discovered that the mask could become a symbol for this problem of representation, the overwhelming desire to see something that is deliberately hidden or masked from view. So I attempted to represent, as literally as possible, an individual that I could not see—and within the context of traditional portraiture this sets up a contradiction of sorts.  Symbolically, this seemingly impossible act resonated with me; it was a time when rhetorical, and actual attacks against an unknown enemy inundated our media landscape. 

On the one hand, my work could be viewed as a form of portraiture, but on the other hand, it could also be seen as a system of classification, one that mimics stylistically the meticulous detail of a naturalist painter and yet mocks conceptually the desire to contain and subjugate one’s topic of representation. I tend to think about this approach to portraiture in relation to the work of 18th and 19th century catalogers, like John James Audubon.  His project to visually document bird species of North America produced meticulous paintings, which he considered scientific in nature.

For the full interview, click on "Interview tihe Gregg Perkins" and link to his website.