Julie Weber
When I look at photographs, I oscillate between understanding the photograph as a two-dimensional image and as a three-dimensional object. When I alter a photograph, the physical mark cannot be limited to the object without influencing the image. I think about the surface of a photograph as a malleable site where image and object overlap can be made most evident. There is a magnetization that I seek, where image becomes object and object becomes image, where the two simultaneously need and resist one another.
In Undisclosed Typologies, I use photographs that were originally created as records, privileging information above aesthetics. The surfaces of these photographs bear physical traces of usage and time, pointing to their existence before I acquire them. Cutting into the surface and peeling away parts of the image, I inscribe my own mark into their history, while leaving the base layer of the photograph intact – perhaps akin to how our minds can be aware of gaps in memory yet unable to fill them with certainty. The process of removal is a way for me to minimize the specificity of representation, supplanting original subject matter with geometrical shapes that, while informed by what used to be there, now reveal what was already there – hidden beneath.
Weber lives and works in Chicago. She holds an MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago and a BA in Psychology and Sociology from Dominican University. She is currently a HATCH Projects artist-in-residence with the Chicago Artists Coalition.
Courtesy of the Artist
Julie Weber
www.julielweber.com
More to read
