Curated by Natalie Bell, Assistant Curator.
For her exhibition at the New Museum, Cameron-Weir incorporates tools typical of a laboratory to establish a mood of observation and to propose a tension between scientific and occult practices. While her new works evoke a range of associations, they are informed by her study of antiquated scientific texts about vision, medieval armor and torture devices, and early-Renaissance orthopedics—as well as her interest in corporeal symmetry and erogenous zones as aspects of the body forged through human evolution. Cameron-Weir’s installation also draws from the emerging field of sensory archaeology, which questions the privileging of vision in the historical imagination, and aims to enrich speculations about our human ancestors through diverse phenomenological observations.
“Elaine Cameron-Weir” is curated by Natalie Bell, Assistant Curator.
Elaine Cameron-Weir was born in 1985 in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada, and lives and works in New York. She has had solo exhibitions at VENUS, Los Angeles (2016); Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York (2016); Ramiken Crucible, New York (2014); Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels (2014); White Flag Library, St. Louis, MO (2013); and Desaga, Cologne, Germany (2012). Cameron-Weirhas also been included in group exhibitions at La Biennale de Montréal (2016–17); FUTURA, Prague (2016); GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy (2014–15); and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2014). Cameron-Weir earned a BFA from the Alberta College of Art and Design and an MFA from New York University.
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In celebration of A.K. Burns’ Leave No Trace (2016), this record release party includes performances and readings by artists and writers including Justin Allen, Fia Backström, CAConrad, Katherine Hubbard, and Juliana Huxtable. Leave No Trace is an experimental audio project released as a limited edition vinyl with an accompanying poem. The recording consists of two full-length LP tracks that combine ambient environmental recordings, vocalization, sounds generated from various materials, and an old electric guitar. The title references wilderness ethics, pointing to questions around unregulated spaces, bodies and actions that go unrecorded, and what is natural or naturalized.
A.K. Burns is the artist-in-residence through the Department of Education and Public Engagement’s Spring R&D Season: BODY. In her exhibition and residency “Shabby but Thriving,” A.K. Burns continues a serial work that draws on theater, science fiction, philosophy, and ecological anxieties. The project is organized around five elements: power (the sun), water, land, void, and body. In “Shabby but Thriving,” commissioned by and premiering at the New Museum, Burns presents the project’s next chapter, a two-channel video staged within an installation that explores the subjugation and agency of various bodies.
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