ennoia drawing series

1999-

ongoing cycle of drawings made with graphite powder, charcoal, water, hair die, wine, and pencil on paper or canvas

dimensions variable

Exhibited:

Monika Weiss - Vessels, Chelsea Art Museum, New York, 2004, curator: Nina Colosi

Monika Weiss - Five Rivers, Lehman College Art Gallery, CUNY, curator: Susan Hoetzel

Published:

Monika Weiss - Five Rivers, Lehman College Art Gallery & Galerie Samuel Lallouz, 2007, edited by Susan Hoetzel

Monika Weiss - Vessels, Chelsea Art Museum, New York, 2004, edited by Dina Helal

Artist Statement

Ennoia (in Ancient Greek a “though”) is a word I found when reading Gnostic writings, where it connotes a particle of light that falls into matter and is trapped within. This cycle of drawings relates to my ongoing series of installations which are based on the form of a medieval baptismal font. In medieval times the baptismal font was usually designed as an octagonal vessel or a chalice made from stone. The series of installations includes live performances as all as video/sound/water sculptures, in which the vessel contains a virtual projection of my curled up body, moving slowly alongside the walls of the vessel, as if forever captured inside such as White Chalice (Ennoia), 2004.

As an intermedia artist I work with the body as a vehicle of expression. In Ennoia, the body is represented as a vessel but also as contained inside a sculpted vessel, a contained for the body. In my work both the body and the vessel are represented as having unstable boundaries. In this work I hope to poetically evoke leakage, porosity, overflow, and transformation to speak to the fragility and transitoriness of being. In Ennoia (Bird), 1999, I drew my body seen frontally, as if self-transforming into a bird, with my arms becoming wings. In Baptismal Font (Project for the Rape of Europa), 1999, the red hair die acts as the ever changing, toxic fluid that eats the paper, overflowing from the clean pencil lines of the architectural form of the vessel. In Factory of Sound, 1998, I imagined an installation consisting of a 100 base players performing my minimal musical composition, standing in 5 inches of water flooding the floor of what seems to be an abandoned factory, while I am immersed inside the baptismal font (seen on the lower right of the drawing). In Chalice, 2003, the vessel is drawn in charcoal over a canvas stained with wine and water, representing overflow, staining and leakage. Both Chalice and Baptismal Font relate directly to the sculptures in the Ennoia cycle, for example Koiman (1998), an installation in which the vessel was filled with continuisely overflowing motor oil.

Monika Weiss

Essay Excerpt

Speaking of the many drawings she has executed over the last few years, the intimacy and anguished charisma of which can reduce us to tears in a heartbeat, she speaks of the legion of traces and syncopated gestures left behind in those works. The charcoal marks always point to the body, her body, our body, and they are living "intervals of time". (…) Weiss understands the lived-body as passage, threshold, pure liminality, and permeable membrane when she finds herself willfully waylaid in her own work, retracing her own perilous trajectory from birth to where she is now. "Where am I in syncope?" is a question she has asked herself time and time again, and if the answer still eludes her, it is because there is always another drawing to execute, another installation to conceive, another performance to enact. Where does the self find itself in the folklore of the moment, rife with memory traces, in that tense and unfathomable interval between interiority and exteriority, between living and dying, past and present?

The self is segregated in its time-stream but also irremediably wed to a temporality that is, by nature, inimical and the body is subject to its perennial rites of attrition. Monika Weiss acts as witness to that attrition even as she, in ritual and repetitive acts, escapes for a time the humbling stream of real duration, and in stepping outside it, shows us all how a self might inhabit a break in linearity and make it her own - a place to be and think within, perhaps? Where is she in syncope? Certainly, outside the comforting predictability of the mainstream, outside the stream of a physical time which never stops. She is on the lip of the dark well. On the precipice, where there is no safe harbor, and only hazard as fissures open up all around in the fabric of certainty, and the self must bow irrevocably earthwards to the darkness in its own nature.

Weiss has over the years executed an extensive corpus of drawings. She has said, "I position the human body outside time or defined space." (17) She is literally drawing a radius across the full breadth of syncope in these works with her own aging body as sector, alembic and divining rod, as though possessed by its own carnal geometry, tracing out the luminous grid of the interval, the "moments in and out of time" across the full array of the sensible of which she is so ineluctably a part.

In her drawing she is just as aware of the reversibility of the seeing and the visible, of the touching and the touched, as in all of her other work. Her large-scale drawings in a continuing series of harrowing representations of her own body in a curled-up or standing positions, shadows on the face of the deep, invoke and provoke the reversibility which is integral to her manner of working, whatever the medium, and are always predicated on the medium of her own body as best conduit of expression and shifting shadow between the visible and the invisible, the seer and the seen.

- James D. Campbell, Drawing on Syncope: The Performativity of Rapture in the Art of Monika Weiss in Monika Weiss-Five Rivers, Lehman College Art Gallery, City University of New York & Galerie Samuel Lallouz, 2007