Rebecca Weisman

Lives and works in Richmond, VT, USA

Artist statement

I am a concept driven artist working at the intersection of moving image and sculpture exploring nature, reenactment, and the body and its messy relationship to the unconscious.. My work is strongly feminist and draws upon 1970's performance art/sculpture, land art, écriture féminine, traditions of experimental film and video, and psychoanalytic theory. My work is project-based and shown through installations in which a found image, story or event is reenacted for video, creating a mythical lexicon of props and objects, with fantastical sets and bodily performances. These films are embedded back into or projected on top of sculptural forms, culminating in multiple intertextual layers of video, surfaces, and objects. The work is highly iterative with each restaging adding a new conceptual and material layer. This iterative approach comes from a lifelong interest in the filmic image as a document of intractable subjectivity. My approach is both cerebral and corporeal, honoring the emotional landscape of interiorities and inviting viewers to deeply connect with their own body. The body of workshown here, Skin Ego, centers on a found photograph of a whale dissection, and takes the whale's decaying body as a site of exploration of self and Other. Through repetition, reenactment, and reiteration, artifacts from the whale’s unknowable world are symbolically amplified via video performances, sculptures, and sound. One component of the installation is called The skin of the whale,...

Artwork