Sally Weber
Interview by Emma Snodgrass, SciArt Intern
ES: What properties of the natural world would you say influence your work most?
SW: Light, most definitely. I was introduced to working with light through optical holography in the 1980's as pure color focused in space. While a graduate student at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies under Otto Piene, I made my first holographic optical elements to split sunlight into its spectral colors for solar installations. This is light in it's purest sense as color expanding through space from it's source to the eye, not reflected off surfaces. The colors seen in the artworks altered with viewpoint in relation to the sun's position, and bind the experience of the work directly to the environment. Alignment, a seven foot sculpture, focuses three lines of light's primaries (red, green and blue) five feet in front of the structure. The viewer's position in and out of the focused lines alter the experience of the work.
Interview by Emma Snodgrass, SciArt Intern
ES: What properties of the natural world would you say influence your work most?
SW: Light, most definitely. I was introduced to working with light through optical holography in the 1980's as pure color focused in space. While a graduate student at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies under Otto Piene, I made my first holographic optical elements to split sunlight into its spectral colors for solar installations. This is light in it's purest sense as color expanding through space from it's source to the eye, not reflected off surfaces. The colors seen in the artworks altered with viewpoint in relation to the sun's position, and bind the experience of the work directly to the environment. Alignment, a seven foot sculpture, focuses three lines of light's primaries (red, green and blue) five feet in front of the structure. The viewer's position in and out of the focused lines alter the experience of the work.
Alignment - 3 views, (1987), 84"x 36"x 20", holographic optical element, acrylic, Collection of the Osthaus Museum, Hagen, Germany. Photo courtesy of the artist.
In working with light I became more engaged with physics, astronomy and optics. I also researched the integration of light into archeological sites and architecture, its impact in psychology, and the powerful symbolism light carries worldwide. Light has been my means of exploring abstraction, the figure and objects deconstructed into their essential particle forms as photons suspended in space. A photon is always in the present. So to conceive of solidity as moments of sculpted light intrigues me. When, according to physics, particles exist as fields in motion, our perception of solid reality speaks more to the limitations of our physical and biological perceptions than the potential nature of reality.
Realms: Connect, (2013), 24"x 24"x 7", one of five panels, floor-mounted installation, digital hologram. Photo courtesy of the artist.
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ES: Your project Depth and Field cites Wunderkammer, the cabinet of wonders of the 17th and 18th centuries, as inspiration. Representing the natural world has taken on different forms throughout the history of science: a history of production as much a history of discovery. What do you think is next in this time line?
SW: Wunderkammer represents the fissure that cracked opened a new understanding of the natural world. The careful and systematic observation of nature by artists in the Renaissance and the natural philosophers from the 16th-18th centuries gradually displaced the Aristotelian and religious belief systems with analysis, experiments and discoveries. The large-format, digital images of Depth & Field are historical in reference as I was interested in looking closely at things that are not noticed. By bringing detritus, leaves, insects, small object or animals up to our scale, intricate relationships become apparent. Light reinvested these simple objects with presence and dimensionality. Like those who gathered the curious rocks with shells in them to place in their cabinets long ago, I found a poetry in revealing the unexpected complexities of the mundane which resonate far wider with proximity. Digital technology enabled previously inconceivable possibilities. Big data reveals emerging patterns from vast quantities of information. Correctly interpreted, new patterns could change the way we conceive of the universe and our world. Along with neurological scanning, they might untangle the complexities within our heads or restructure the paradoxes of origin in cosmology and physics. To me, the artistic challenge is to speak through new technologies not just of them, reconnecting to the human condition and other relationships. In Descent, a six part installation, the human figure is delineated by moire-like patterns, but they actually describe the micro-motion of breath, blood and muscle tension captured by a pulsed laser. This hidden turbulence is constant. It is the unseen churning of our physical, mental or emotional states in flux and could not have been captured any other way. |
Flash Point (2011), 54"x 40", digital print, edition of 9. Photo courtesy of the artist.
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Descent - Fissure (2006), 34"x 24", one of six pulsed holographic images. Photo courtesy of the artist.
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Eventually, perhaps we might be able to image the connectivity between mind and body and further reveal the intricate complexities binding ourselves and the natural world. This complexity is what the artists, natural philosophers, and scientists pulled apart to look deeply into nature and try to understand it and ourselves.
ES: Would you say that your work is representative - in the sense that it represents what we learn from science and the natural world - or experimental, taking from scientific inquiry to produce certain experiential and visual effects? SW: My work is informed by the explorative techniques of science and technology. I research projects extensively following the thread of an idea or a question, often into to new fields of inquiry. Some of my work is representative, some experiential, and others abstract depending on the intent and means. All of it traces to a fascination with light as a dimensional medium. Optical holography focuses light in space infusing color with physicality as no other medium. Photography and digital imaging offer unlimited means to manipulate the virtual world. Sculpture inhabits materials and space. Each has its own language and describes its own world. I employ and integrate them to give a body to a thought. Sally is currently working on a public art project for the city of Fort Worth, TX and developing new work for a one-person show, January 2016. To contact Sally you can email her at [email protected] and to learn more about her work visit her website at www.sallyweber.com.
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