Margaret Weber
May 10 - June 23, 2013
OPENS: Friday, May 10, 7-10pm
Andra Ursuta on Margaret Weber:
For her debut at Ramiken Crucible, Margaret Weber shows large sculptural tapestries made from pieces of industrial carpeting stripped almost bare. Hung on walls or slumped onto the floor, these ghostly objects are suspended in a sort of afterlife; in their former glory, they furbished the offices, classrooms, sales floors, and waiting areas that make up the modern world, mapping dull gray expanses of corporate interstitial space. In their present, varying unraveled states, most of the soft matter has been picked clean with a relentlessness that feels both calculated and out of control. Weber's reductivist touch is traditionally female work turned against itself. To fashion tapestries, she exacerbates generative manual labor (the kind that spins soft materials into concrete form, ectoplasm-like), its monotony and introversion, to the point it becomes malignant.
May 10 - June 23, 2013
OPENS: Friday, May 10, 7-10pm
Andra Ursuta on Margaret Weber:
For her debut at Ramiken Crucible, Margaret Weber shows large sculptural tapestries made from pieces of industrial carpeting stripped almost bare. Hung on walls or slumped onto the floor, these ghostly objects are suspended in a sort of afterlife; in their former glory, they furbished the offices, classrooms, sales floors, and waiting areas that make up the modern world, mapping dull gray expanses of corporate interstitial space. In their present, varying unraveled states, most of the soft matter has been picked clean with a relentlessness that feels both calculated and out of control. Weber's reductivist touch is traditionally female work turned against itself. To fashion tapestries, she exacerbates generative manual labor (the kind that spins soft materials into concrete form, ectoplasm-like), its monotony and introversion, to the point it becomes malignant.
Weber's upright works move once-horizontal floor covers to a vertical, contemplative plane, enacting a kind of resurrection. But these mastodons are wall-to-wall carbon copies of the places they once occupied, vaguely crooked rectangles with the odd missing corner. This ensures their perpetual awkward habitation of any other space. The work's unyielding scale also challenges the wasteful monumentality of much successful contemporary art, favoring restrained, targeted stripping over a cumulative approach. Through methodical pulling and teasing, the soft surface layer, the one that would record the stains, spills and footprints of everyday use, has been reduced to discretely repeating specks of minimal noise that distantly echos larger organizational systems that comprise our lives.
Ramiken Crucible389 Grand Street, New York NY
www.ramikencrucible.com
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