Carly Owens Weiss: The Boys Will Get Hungry if They See Fruit

Tracey Morgan Gallery is pleased to present The Boys Will Get Hungry if They See Fruit, an exhibition of new paintings and soft sculptures by multidisciplinary artist Carly Owens Weiss. This is Weiss’ first solo exhibition with the gallery. A reception for the artist will be held Friday, November 15 from 6-8PM.

In this body of work, Owens Weiss wrestles with selfhood and interiority through indirect means. She uses symbolism to find the human through objects and explores the relationship between these objects and the body. The artist also reinterprets symbols present within classical antiquity and leans into their inherent dualities. The pearl can be virtuous and sinister, curtains can reveal and conceal, fruit can be sacred and taboo, reflections mirror and distort reality. Elements of pleasure and sensuality are contrasted with ephemeral moments of tension and suspense.

A societal gaze is implied within the work and the artist creates imagery based upon the physical and psychological effects of such gaze. In works with explicit human habitation, the body is never presented in its entirety and is often closely cropped. This compression and fragmentation create an ambiguity, leaving room for divergent narratives. The work alludes that there is more to the story beyond the picture plane and suggests that what is occluded or veiled is as much of a protagonist as what is depicted. The work exists in a gray space, living somewhere between liberation and shame, truth and deception, fantasy and reality.

Owens Weiss states: “As I draw nearer to entering my thirties, the experience of living in my own body as it ages and the changes I feel within it have greatly influenced my current work. In my practice, I consider the archetypal depictions of women presented in male dominated figuration throughout history and how this continues to influence societal expectations today. Through my pieces, I aim to recontextualize perceptions of womanhood and exert my own influence over imagery within the art historical canon to instill a sense of empowerment and autonomy. Through this process I am learning to harness my own power in a reality where I often feel like I have none.”

Carly Owens Weiss is a multidisciplinary artist based in Colorado. As an artist, she is interested in the violence of contrasts and navigating the feelings that arise when the familiar or mundane is juxtaposed with something unusual or irrational. The tensions between comedy and tragedy, femininity and masculinity and seduction and repulsion greatly inform her work. In her pieces, Owens Weiss draws parallels between objects, the body and the experiences lived within it to create contemporary vanitas imagery. Often her work depicts temporal moments, leaving the viewer in a state of stillness and anticipation of what has either passed or is yet to come. The investigation of the surface is paramount to her practice. Her pieces are rendered “beautifully,” momentarily distracting the viewer from the dark complexities that lie beneath the surface. This distraction is, in part, to make the viewer forget our fundamental realities and relish in an aesthetic pleasure, which eventually and inevitably becomes interrupted. Ultimately, she is confronting contemporary issues of womanhood and expectations of gender through a personal and symbolic lens.