LMAKgallery is pleased to present Limits, an exhibition of large-scale sculptures and installation by Rachel Mica Weiss. In Limits, the New York-based artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, Weiss draws inspiration from her education in psychology and her early training in weaving to explore the confluence among structures that house the body, ranging from the geological to the architectural, from textile structures to our formless psychological constructs.

In an achromatic exhibition of process-driven, figurally-scaled sculptures, each representing or depicting a limit, Weiss pushes the limits of her materials —cast concrete, marble, and obsidian. Limits carries forward the artist’s series of Folds —cast concrete slabs scaled to the artist’s body, which bend like fabric and lean like human forms against the gallery walls. Obsidian boulders weighing down each marbleized Fold seem to defy gravity or teeter uneasily, heightening the exhibition’s sense of tenuousness and adding another perceptual twist to viewers’ experience. In a new series of wall-based sculptures, Weiss has shaped marble back into topographical forms, bounding each in a cast concrete frame that also reads as marble. Mixing real with simulacra throughout the exhibition, the artist often makes it difficult to determine which is which.

Limits highlights Weiss’ interest in, and facility, with material transformation, a tool she uses to question viewers’ assumptions and expectations about material integrity: cast concrete reads as marble; rigid objects undulate; heft defies gravity. By mining and conflating the material and visual languages of textiles and architecture to accomplish this perceptual confusion, Weiss both gives form to the boundaries that define us and articulates aspects of the human condition. Her works pull the histories of architecture, figural marble sculpture, and landscape painting into a contemporary light. Her use of scale, physical presence, and weight allows viewers to relate to each sculptural “body,” to become self-aware and space-aware. Like the undulating folds of cast concrete masquerading as carved marble, her vision of the walls humans build for themselves is one in which perceived limitations can be undermined and passage is possible.

Rachel Mica Weiss (b. 1986) is a sculptor and installation artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Weiss earned a BA in psychology from Oberlin College and an MFA in sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute, and she is a 2011 recipient of the San Francisco Foundation Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship. Solo exhibitions include Liminal at LMAKgallery, NY (2017), Countermeasures at Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA (2015), In Place at Fridman Gallery, New York, NY (2014), Engulfing the Elusory at the San Francisco Arts Commission, San Francisco, CA (2013), and a forthcoming exhibition at Lux Art Institute, Encinitas, CA (2018). Selected group exhibition venues include: Wayne State University, Detroit, MI; Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY; BravinLee Programs, New York, NY; and the Fiber Philadelphia Biennial, Philadelphia, PA. Residencies include Lux Art Institute, Marble House Project, chashama, and Vermont Studio Center. Weiss has been commissioned to create permanent, large-scale installations for the US Embassy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan through the Art in Embassies Program; Airbnb, Seattle, WA; Facebook, New York, NY; Brookfield’s One Allen Center in Houston, TX; 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge, NY; The Ashland in Brooklyn, NY; and MediaMath’s 4 World Trade Center office, among others. Weiss’s work has been reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, Hyperallergic, and Bad at Sports, among others; she is a member of Artist Pension Trust.