Ann Weber
Artist Residency Season:
2014-15
Artist Name:
Ann Weber
Profile:
Ann Weber works in bigger-than-life scale. Her biomorphic sculptures in the exhibition “Love and Other Audacities” are made of cardboard — cardboard finished with shellac, and mostly in shades of beige and brown, and sometimes white and sometimes with splashes of color. Weber stumbled upon the idea when she moved and found herself with a surfeit of cardboard boxes. She’d been searching for a material that would be cheap, readily available, and workable.
Epiphany came to the former Evansville resident as she sat on the floor, surrounded by the flattened, corrugated cardboard containers she'd just unpacked. Weber had been looking for a while for a better medium for large works. She'd given up on clay and plaster, finding them unwieldy to work with, and they were too heavy to haul up the steps to her latest studio, a 1,000-square-foot space above a futon factory with no elevators. The answer just came to her as she looked at the boxes.
Twenty years later, she’s mastered flattening boxes and cutting them up into strips with a hand-held blade. She then staples them together into shapes formed by hand—a nod, she admits, to the coil-building of pottery. (She had been a potter and studied under Viola Frey in San Francisco.) She pieces them together until forms take shape. Sometimes the shapes are primal, looking like pods and seeds. Weber has turned salvaged cardboard boxes into monumental works of art shown in exhibitions across the country and created in art residencies in the United States and in Germany.
Some stand, some hang like enormous cardboard balloons, and some have been molded and cast as towering bronze sculptures for outdoor commissions. Sometimes they are woven or coiled abstract figures. Sometimes they are smooth, elegant and towering shapes, resembling members of a wedding party awaiting a portrait. It’s a huge homage to the craft world,” says Weber. “For me craft is not a dirty word. Craft and art are inextricably linked.”
Works:
Ann Weber's work has been exhibited in San Francisco, Denver, Newborg, Oregon, the Boise Art Museum, New York, Los Angeles Craft and Folk Museum, and many other cities across the US. She has completed public art commissions in numerous cities including Phoenix, Denver, Seattle, and across California. Ann recently returned from Rome, Italy, where she was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome, and has received awards from Americans for the Arts and Oberpfalzer Kunslerhaus in Germany.