New York
“Cyclicalities”—Rachel Mica Weiss’s most materially and thematically ambitious exhibition to date (on view through November 2, 2024)—features nine new sculptures that transform marble, alabaster, concrete, and stainless steel from their everyday, utilitarian usage into things more softly meditative. As in previous works, Weiss muses on the intersection of adornment, containment, and the body; here though, she also exploits the innate properties of her materials to consider time and its effect on selfhood.
With a studio in Upstate New York, where granite crags and sedimentary masses shape the surrounding landscape, Weiss has ready access to stone. She doesn’t use those particular rocks in “Cyclicalities,” but it is easy to see their influence in her forms, textures, and surfaces: the two sculptures anchoring the expansive gallery space verge on the monolithic, while tendrils of mineral veins pulse through all of the works. For Weiss, stone seems more than just a material or aesthetic inspiration. The idea of geological time—in which the rhythm of the earth slowly makes and mutates material—is a conduit for her to contend with how space and experience are inscribed within us.
Chain and necklace-like forms—as well as clasps and knots used as points of suspension—recall the body in oblique, elegiac ways. For instance, Protector IV (Veil) and Protector V (Veil)(both 2024), two works in an ongoing series, consist of hanging, looped configurations of alabaster and steel “chainmail” with almost angelic outlines. Each has two shorter droops for “arms” and a longer one for a body, which cast faint shadows that add to the ethereal quality hinted at in the titles. A closer look at the carved links reveals delicate arrangements of white, gray, and almost black in the stone; Weiss has sequenced these natural characteristics in a formal syncopation, seemingly alluding to how humans always seek to order nature, and the futility of that endeavor. Like the other suspended works, Protector IV (Veil) and Protector V (Veil) hang from shiny steel anchors and hooks in the wall (which form a surrounding aura), the cold superficiality of silver starkly juxtaposed against the opaque warmth of the alabaster. No matter their appearance though, all of Weiss’s materials are derived from the earth (even steel comes from iron). Their contrast in these specter-like shapes created from links and chains suggests the millennia-long past that has configured the world and how it continues to contour lived experience.
Shelter and defense, alluded to throughout the exhibition, are expressed literally in the hand-carved keys and padlocks that punctuate the single, necklace-like chains of How to Pass Through to the Other Side? and How to Get Out of This? (both 2024). Made from verde antique marble and blue alabaster, these works project a tension between the mundane and the precious that makes their skillful craftsmanship seem especially mannered in comparison to the naturalness of the Protector works. The titles—questions of means, and specifically, a wondering about how to change time and place—imbue both works with a sense of foreboding, as if protection might indeed be necessary. The realism of the locks and keys, typically made from alloyed metal and now translated to stone, reminds us that the long time of geology works to keep us safe even within our domestic spaces.
The boundary between interiority and exteriority is an abiding theme for Weiss, and in “Cyclicalities,” she troubles binaries between in and out, natural and unnatural, present and past, presenting borders as a continuum of experience rather than a polarity. Crossing those boundaries is referenced not only in titles, but also in the central voids of Protector VII (Chamber) (2024) and Protector III (Hood) (2024), where circles, spheres, and holes imply the porousness of in and out.
Nowhere is this more enigmatic than in the pair of weighty, mound-like monoliths In Time I and In Time II (both 2024). Made from cast concrete (tinted greenish blue and teal-ish green), with surfaces cratered like the moon, each form includes embedded spinning marble spheres, whose rotation articulates Weiss’s interest in the circularity of time. However literal and focused this spinning is, however, it gestures away from the works themselves, rippling through space toward the perimeter of the gallery to reach the more permeable, suspended works. With our attention shifted to this outer edge, and an implied beyond, we can sense how Weiss’s rhythmic connections of material, shape, and form echo patterns of time and perception made manifest through stone.
