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.