Exhibitions

ELEANOR ALDRICH + BARBARA WEISSBERGER: CUSTODIA

C for Courtside / 513 Cooper St. October 4, 2019 - October 25, 2019

Eleanor Aldrich,  Barbara Weissberger

Our collaborative installations combine original objects, sculptures, paintings, and photographs that come together from our separate studios to form a new work. As we work in separate regions of the country, the meeting and melding of our work is phenomenological – a third thing resulting from shared formal sensibilities and overlapping philosophical concerns. The work comes together through Skype chats, emails, individual material investigations, and the final in-person negotiation of the works in relation to each other and in space.

We are curious about perception and reality. Together our work forms structures within which the actual (real) thing, abstraction, pictorial space and physical space freely circulate and mingle. We make (or alter) all the objects in the installations, and even the flattest parts (photograph and canvas) are called out as physical objects.

Mops, drains, buckets, rags, dustpans, brooms, vacuum cleaners and other tools of cleaning and maintenance will form the central imagery of CUSTODIA. Cleaning tools are liminal - dirty in that they are always touching things that are dirty, but necessary for cleanliness. The banal is blurred with the mystical, the chore with the compulsion to create. Dirty and abject things may appear authentic and trustworthy in that they are by definition non-seductive and contain no outer shell of artifice, which infers some interior meaning--though the clutter is arranged, and the colors to be strewn are chosen.