Medusa - Lethe

2023 -

graphite powder, water, resin, pencil, and dry pigment on rice paper

39 x 72 inches (horizontal) and 72 x 39 inches (vertical)

photographic documentation by Jean Vong

ARTIST STATEMENT

Medusa - Lethe is a new cycle of large-scale drawings on rice paper. In this cycle of drawings I work with water, resin and dry pigment to evoke both the myth of Medusa and that of the river Lethe. Blue pigment and water create aquatic areas akin to lakes and oceans within the landscape of each drawing, punctuated by cracks and folds that connote the passageways. This ongoing cycle of drawings is accompanied by sound and film work, currently in progress.

Essay Excerpt

For Weiss, drawing embodies and expresses the passage of time, repetition, suggestion, and repercussion; while also celebrating the facture of media (the possibilities that physical materials allow) […] Unlike other elements of her work — digital images, words, music and sound — drawing, through asserting its authority, implies permanence, but this too can dissipate and become a vestige where the mark becomes a trace. Weiss’ drawing oscillates between proposal and presence, the allusive and the tangible where it competes (not in a precocious way) to establish its unassailable position in the consciousness mediated by the artist.

- Mark McDonald, curator, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Drawing Consciousness: Monika Weiss in Monika Weiss-Nirbhaya, Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, 2021, pp. 54 - 76 [to read the essay click here]