Artist's statement
My works in collage, drawing and installation (collage on wall) explore the intersection of the psychological and the social. ’Δ®The imagery - culled from my own photographs and found materials includes beef, burgers, body builders, trucks, cars, and a variety of flora and fauna. These works are meant to confuse the natural and the synthetic. Landscape - evidenced to greater and lesser extents in different pieces - provides a constant undercurrent.
The images of meat exemplify an ethos of production/consumption and function as a lens for our relationship with the natural world, for consumer culture (its bounty and its excesses) and sustainability. Meat is both natural and processed; body and food; repulsive and beautiful; macho (grade-A beef) and feminist.
Works based on Rorschach-like structures were prompted by observation of a natural phenomenon, the mirroring of reflected trees and rocks on the still surface of high-mountain Montana lakes. The large Rorschach-like ornamental structures reveal, on closer view, strange arrangements of small bits of representation. Like the once-popular inkblot test, the work suggests a complicit relationship between viewer and artwork in the construction of meaning.
Barbara Weissberger
-2009