Announcing representation of Elaine Cameron-Weir
19 January 2024
Lisson Gallery is pleased to announce the representation of New York-based artist Elaine Cameron-Weir. Her first presentation with the gallery will be this March in New York.
Elaine Cameron-Weir’s work is informed by the array of systems and structures that humans have created to deal with the unknown – be that through scientific inquiry, religion, modes of governance or creative practices. Her sculptures incorporate part-objects repurposed from their scientific, medical, military or faith-giving functions into reliquaries or representations of larger systems of belief and power. Her installations combine these found fragments with definitively handmade elements, using techniques as varied as vitreous enamelling, glass casting, metalworking and leather tooling. Together these arrangements are often suspended from the ceiling, seemingly levitating from the ground, yet being simultaneously held in tension by gravity and an architectural framework of pulleys and cables. Materials can also be ephemeral, incorporating heat, light and scent, suggesting transformations of solid matter into dust or diffusion into atmosphere. Cameron-Weir’s sculptures often form uncanny mirror images, through symmetrical details that emphasise the dualistic nature of any narrative or narrator. Although her practice resists straightforward characterization or iconographic interpretation, Cameron-Weir’s works offer the possibility of passage through a portal or beyond a threshold, further facilitating the transition from one state to the next.
Among the central motifs for her first exhibition at Lisson Gallery are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, foretold in The Book of Revelations as harbingers of the End of Days through famine, pestilence, disease and death. A stampede of horseshoes conjoins into a giant, snaking conveyor belt structure dividing the main space, with horseshoe nails and horse leather military garments being woven into other works here, linking, supporting and adorning a complex system of interrelated forms. They also suggest the worlds of horseracing, gambling, rodeos and cowboys or frontiersmen, but could also refer to an impending change in politics according to the ‘horseshoe theory’ – in which both the far-left and far-right are drawn inexorably closer to each other and their extremes.
Elaine Cameron-Weir was born in 1985 in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada; she lives and works in New York. Past solo exhibitions at institutions include: Dressing for Windows (Exploded View), SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, USA (2022); STAR CLUB REDEMPTION BOOTH, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, USA (2021); exhibit from a dripping personal collection, Dortmunder Kunstverein, Dortmund, Germany (2018); Outlooks, Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, USA (2018) and viscera has questions about itself, New Museum, New York, USA (2017). Her work has featured in major group exhibitions including The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani at the 59th Venice Biennale, Italy (2022); New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century, BAMPFA, Berkeley, USA (2021); Present Tense, Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA (2019), as well as the Belgrade Biennale, Serbia (2021); the Montreal Biennial, Canada (2017) and the Fellbach Triennial of Small-Scale Sculpture, Germany (2016).
Cameron-Weir is also represented by Hannah Hoffman in Los Angeles.
Image: pupil of couture / 4horsemen hairshirt (SS 2024 apocalypse collection), 2024. stainless steel, horse leather trench coats, cow leather, studs, hardware, sand. © Elaine Cameron-Weir
