CURTIS WEAVER

JANUARY 19 – FEBRUARY 23, 2013


OPENING RECEPTION:
SATURDAY, JANUARY 19, 2013, 6 – 8 PM

GARBOUSHIAN GALLERY is pleased to present Curtis Weaver in his first solo exhibition with the gallery. Utilizing a wide range of materials including bronze, silicone, and urethane, Weaver creates paintings and sculptures that resonate far beyond the implicit language of science or art, creating instead, unique and excellently crafted objects that serve to mediate, or even in some cases, to expand the reductive discourse of either specific system of understanding.

Creating a visually persuasive, fictional universe that alludes to and embellishes both art  and science, drawing comparisons with ecological and biological systems heavily informed by evolution, Weaver both simultaneously collapses and reanimates history, both human and of the natural world, creating strangely alien, viral translations and transmutations wherein a broken tree branch sprouts a pair of sickeningly viscous pink lips. Juxtaposing imagery derived from nature with highly exaggerated human physical anatomy, "plant and animal processes are swapped and merged together as these physical anomalies are able to survive and thrive, having amalgamated into sound physiological beings," and it is this distortion that challenges the precepts of the viewer's imagination, posing questions that border on the inane, yet suggest an essential and unrelenting relationship between species, affording us perhaps a glimpse into our own possible evolution.

CURTIS WEAVER

CURTIS WEAVER
Partial Preview Images





Weaver's paintings focus specifically on the intensely realized gesture, a singular moment where a foreign organism appears to attempt connection with another, and while these connections are hesitant and most likely failed, it is the grasping, the extension toward the unknown that is most powerful and convincing.

Having termed specific works "survival machines," Weaver poses the inevitability of our own self-induced extinction, suggesting that these weirdly seductive mechanizations could perhaps steer us closer to our own inherent human apprehensions, our fears, our grief and riddling doubts as if witnessing them in visual form were somehow a much needed panacea.

An Opening Reception for Curtis Weaver's ECO - LIBIDO exhibition will take place on Saturday, January 19, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. The exhibition will remain on view until February 23, 2013. 

ABOUT CURTIS WEAVER:
Curtis Weaver is a multi-disciplinary artist born in Lancaster, OH and currently living and working in Los Angeles, CA. Weaver received his BFA from Ohio University in 2003 and his MFA from the University of Florida in 2007. Shortly after arriving in Los Angeles in late 2007 Weaver began working with the internationally exhibiting art collective "The League of Imaginary Scientists," who have recently exhibited at MOCA, and were the winners of the 2009 international juried art competition funded by the Apex Art Foundation of NY, NY. As an artist inspired by science and driven with a sense of humor Weaver played a vital role in the writing, conceptual development, fabrication and engineering of League projects consisting of interactive art installations.