Entering into Elaine Cameron-Weir’s current exhibition at JTT feels like a pause in time, where you are unsure if the scene before you is futuristic, archaic, or an eerie take on the present. A completely engulfing and somewhat disorienting presentation, strings that show the wind features three pairs of sculptures that fill the room with an electrifying presence.
Supporting the sculptures is an altered gallery floor, covered with steel tiles in a grid formation. The effect is something you can’t quite pin down, somewhere between a generic office building and a doomsday bunker.
Combining materials that have a functional use, Cameron-Weir builds fascinating objects that catch your eye from a distant but demand a much closer, zoomed in examination to take in the entirety of the artist’s craft. Each of the works read as monuments to times past, harping on old technologies to create a forward-looking mechanism.
it thought you were someone else it thought you were me bounded by strings in the distorted phases of a topological superfluid a mysterious density half-speed vortices and long walls, 2019
concrete, liquid candles, glass, stainless steel, leather, neon
The chosen materials come with a hint of irony. On the same sculpture, Cameron-Weir includes electrically charged neon lighting along with lit candles. She strips down her materials to display their source, revealing the elements at play. Among the other materials included in the show (with each piece including its own laundry list of medium), are leather, glass, rawhide, chandelier parts, military whip antenna, steel, pewter, and fluorite.
we all go to work by proxy but it dreams of wires and it was setting the sun it thought it had lost everything but then it found you instead and woke up laughing, 2019
stainless steel, pewter, rawhide, neon, whip antenna, chandelier parts, liquid candle, leather
Equally as long as the various materials listed in the works’ descriptions are the titles. Named after lines from a poem that Cameron-Weir composed, each piece is given another life outside of its physicality that exists in no particular time or place.
but it knew her still somehow by the strings that show the wind impoverished things decorate these tunnels yet it dreams of wires always in a scatter radar memoir (detail), 2019
stainless steel, pewter, leather, fluorite
strings that show the wind is on view at JTT through October 27th.