HEAD(LESS)
HEAD(LESS)ADAM BERIS & MIA WEINER
Ochi Gallery is pleased to present Head(less): Adam Beris & Mia Weiner, on view from December 31, 2020 to February 20, 2021. Head(less) pairs Beris’ tactile oil paintings featuring pop-y signifiers suspended on vibrant canvases with Weiner’s richly-saturated woven tapestries portraying photographic images of intertwined nudes. While stylistically disparate, the works share a careful composition and alluring quality, drawing the viewer in with familiar figuration and satiating with the implication of weighted meaning that lies just below the surface, evading straightforward reading.
In his paintings, Beris utilizes a repetitive abundance of small, distilled images of faces, everyday objects, body parts, and symbols that combined, gesture towards an indexical code. The individual icons are created with paint pushed straight from the tube, giving them an appealing three-dimensionality that pops off the canvas. Profiles of heads lay in a suspended pattern across a flat plain of colored canvas next to a bunch of grapes, a spiral or a crescent moon. The floating signifiers create the experience of an allusive but joyful puzzle, the viewer searching for the secret meaning, or the connective tissue between one image and the next.
Weiner’s woven tapestries depict photographic images forefronting nude bodies, juxtaposed or intertwined, within a neutral, nondescript setting. The manipulated photographs leave the intimately situated figures headless–anonymous, ambiguous in their activities and relationships. The works, at first glance elicit association with a stoic, classical figuration, but further engagement betrays this initial assessment, as you search for understanding amongst the figures’ entwined limbs and headless torsos, coming up just shy of the necessary context to understand their intimacy. The textiles are woven by hand on a Jacquard loom, allowing for the intricate structures and specific color saturations of the woven patterns. Threads bow where the image stops, tangling playfully along the walls’ edge, as a reveal of the materiality and tactility of the tapestry.
In Head(less) Beris and Weiner’s work aligns in a seductive viewing experience that attracts with appealing forms suspended in the space of a tapestry or painting, and entangles with a desire for them to divulge.
Responding to the historical textile, Mia Weiner creates intimate declarations that explore identity, gender, and the psychology of human relationships. Mia currently lives and works in Los Angeles after leaving Brooklyn for her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2020). Mia received her BFA in Fiber from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2013, and her work has been exhibited internationally including in New York, London, Berlin, Athens, Chicago, Miami, Baltimore, and Washington DC.
Born in Milwaukee, WI, Adam received a dual degree in Painting and Creative Writing from Kansas City Art Institute in 2009. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across the United States and internationally including at Over the Influence, Hong Kong, Y53, Los Angeles, CA, USA (2018); Fabien Castanier Gallery Los Angeles, CA, USA (2017); The Late Show, Kansas City, MO, USA (2011). Beris was also included in the exhibition Bounding Boundaries at the MCC Longview Cultural Center in Lee’s Summit, MO, USA (2013). He has an upcoming exhibition at Over the Influence, Los Angeles, in 2021.
*OPEN BY APPOINTMENT, EMAIL GALLERY@OCHIGALLERY.COM TO SCHEDULE
