The Size of Thoughts
Please join us for the opening of Julia Weist’s exhibition The Size of Thoughts
on Thursday, February 7th from 7-7:30 pm at 259 10th Ave (btw 25th & 26th St).
The exhibition will be on view from February 7th-March 4th, 2008.
In The Size of Thoughts, Julia Weist presents new sculptures that measure a viewer’s relational
body-scale to the physical burden of discarded information and paper-reliant narratives.
Combining references to a canon of sculptural Essentialism with new modes of transformative
fabrication, Weist explores how the disposal of pre-digital intellectual content relates
to object-oriented art practices.
A two-part sculpture entitled Lumber visualizes theorist Nicholson Baker’s use of the word to
signify irrelevant information in the brain, exhibited—pointedly—through the minimalist tradition
of displaying what appears to be wood without intervention. The piece re-envisions MDF,
an industrial wood product made from sawdust or paper fibers and resin, as M.D.F. (Made of Discarded
Fantasies)—wooden planks that Weist cast out of pulverized margins of discarded public library
romance novels. The text field of the novels, subjected to a similar process, is exhibited alongside
as a simple pile of “romance” rendered to a primary derivative of the paper’s woodness,
without being developed into a new form with potential for construction.
By drawing on refuse from public collections for her study of the physical scale of narrative,
Weist alludes to an earlier project in which she published a romance novel called Sexy Librarian
modeled after deaccessioned library fiction. The book jacket of Sexy Librarian is exhibited
in The Size of Thoughts next to the cover of a romance novel written fifteen years ago by
her dead step-grandmother called The Colonel’s Campaign. These pieces are framed in real
MDF, as is a third “study” for Lumber, which shows a page of a discarded novel entitled
Afterlove sanded until all the romance was removed.
Installation view, 259 10th Ave
Lumber (detail), 259 10th Ave