re | process, Julie Weber

re | process, Julie Weber
September 20 – November 2, 2019

 

 

The Alice Wilds is honored to announce the opening of re | process, a solo exhibition of recent photographic works by Julie Weber on Friday, September 20th, 2019.

Julie Weber redefines the meaning of the traditional photographic image through her camera-less investigations that regard image as a construction of materials and processes. Her work explores the tension between the time-sensitive, ephemeral nature of the medium and the vulnerable physical properties of its materials, relative to expectations of the photograph as a documented and preserved moment. Dismantling and separating photographs into their essential parts, Weber reconstructs photographic materials into abstract images that exist simultaneously as material, process, subject, and object. The experience of viewing her imagery parallels the transient nature of memory, questioning the manner in which memories are stored and altered over time.
In her current work, Weber employs exhausted spools of thin, transparent polyester coated with heat-sensitive cyan, magenta, and yellow dyes. This material forms the basis of the dye-sublimation process behind commercial print labs and was collected by Weber during a time when she worked in a one-hour photo lab. Once expended, the transparent printer ribbons appear as negatives, bearing the delicate tracings of the images they produced.

re | process is the result of revisiting, repurposing, and reimaging this archive of material byproduct through an oscillation of analog and digital modalities. Rather than focusing on the clear depiction of the original images left on the ribbon, Weber uses the material to form new images that depict visual cues of their own making, referencing the very processes that created them. In some sense, the original images become at once relegated and celebrated as another characteristic of the material. Through the methodical application of color, tone, shape, layering, and repetition, photographic materials and processes are pulled to the fore where they are inseparable from the subject matter.

Julie Weber is an artist and educator based in Chicago, IL. Recent solo exhibitions include Dark Adaptation at Bert Green Fine Art (Chicago, IL) and Light Chronology at For The Thundercloud Generation (Chicago, IL). Weber’s work has been featured nationally in exhibitions at photo-eye Gallery (Santa Fe, NM), Silver Eye Center for Photography (Pittsburgh, PA), Illinois State Museum (Lockport, IL), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago, IL), and internationally at The Polygon Gallery (North Vancouver, BC, Canada), Stour Space (London, UK), and in winter 2020, The Reference (Seoul, South Korea). Her limited-edition artist book, REMNANTS, was published by Skylark Editions (2017) and was selected by the Lucie Foundation for the Month of Photography Los Angeles Photo Book Exhibition (2018). Weber was a FotoFilmic shortlist photographer (2018) and an artist-in-residence at the Chicago Artists Coalition (2015). Upcoming exhibitions include Lensless at Cressman Center for Visual Arts (Louisville, KY) and FotoFilmic18 at SF Camerawork (San Francisco, CA). She received a BA from Dominican University (2006) and earned her MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago (2014). Weber currently teaches at Waubonsee Community College and Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design.

Julie Weber, re | process continues through Saturday, November 2nd, 2019.