Marcia Weese
The daughter of modernist architect, Harry Weese, has published a book about her work.
This monograph of Weese's artwork spans five decades and includes monoprints, woodblock prints, mokuhanga, solar etchings, site specific sculpture, and clay and bronze sculpture.
Her muse is the natural world. Her work has been described as enigmatic portraits landing somewhere between shadow and memory. Her prints glow from within, pointing to an inner life. She is a Zen practitioner as well.
I grew up in downtown Chicago and spent my childhood roller skating between the dense urbanlandscape and the world of crows, lightning bugs, oak trees, and prairie grass. My deepest inspiration springs from the natural world. Trained as a sculptor and using various materials —steel, copper, limestone, water, text — I created site-specific outdoor pieces that spoke to 'place'.
In contrast to the solid nature of sculpture, I am particularly attracted to the ephemeral quality of works on paper, in particular, printmaking. Drawing primarily from Nature, my monoprints, solar etchings, and woodblock prints attempt to reflect the metaphysical world. A vast world that is felt, not just seen.
My prints have been described as intimate, enigmatic portraits of elusive moments that land somewhere between shadow and memory.
"Growing up in a household where the minimalism and reductivism of Mid-Century design were practiced as a family creed, it should come as no surprise that Marcia Weese's early sculpture exhibits these traits. The site-specific projects that Weese created in the beginning of her artistic journey became places in which to contemplate the nature of the world she encountered throughout herown process of discovery and reduction. Combining her continued artistic evolution with a rigorous Zen practice, and its emphasis on impermanence, led the artist to explore the transitory nature of working with paper.To contemplate a Marcia Weese image is to practice meditation. The noise of language, labels, and what can be the distracting details of realism are swept away, leaving fundamental iconic shapes that elicit powerful and poetic associations. Weese's work is not a simple act of subtraction, but a phenomenological process that the artist has been evolving and refining for more than five decades. Each of her monoprints is unique. In her prints, obscurity and revelation combine the signification with the signified, the object with the hand manipulated fields of color. This is why printing contributes so much strength to Weese's work and why her prints have in turn made important contributions to the art of printmaking." — Harry Teague, Harry Teague is an award winning architect from Aspen and Basalt, Colorado
