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Beyond Material
Sculpture of Ann Weber
September 6, 2016 - December 16, 2016

Ann Weber has been
making sculpture, using
cardboard as her primary
medium, in the Bay Area
for over 25 years. She
currently maintains a
studio in Los Angeles
to create a broader
audience for her work
and to be inspired by new
surroundings.
She recently exhibited a
large grouping of her work
at Los Angeles Municipal
Art Gallery and created
a site-specific work for
MOAH Museum in Lancaster, California. She had her second solo show at
her gallery, Dolby Chadwick Gallery in San Francisco in 2015. Additional solo
venues include the Boise Art Museum, Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los
Angeles, Triton Museum, the Fresno Art Museum and the 798 Art Zone in
Beijing.
Residencies at the American Academy in Rome, the Oberpfalzer
Kunslerhaus in Schwandorf, Germany, the Internation School of Beijing,
Montalvo Art Center in Saratoga, California, the De Young Museum in San
Francisco, Albion College in Michigan and the Lux Institute in San Diego
provided her with opportunities to create sculpture in extraordinary
settings and interact with a diverse audience.
Casting the cardboard sculptures into bronze or fiberglass culminated
in Public Art Projects in the State Capitol Health Services Building in
Sacramento, Skyline Park in Denver and the Cesar Chavez Library in Phoenix.
Ann Weber: Necessary Inventions
By Scarlet Cheng
Necessity is the mother of invention, even for artists who seem to have
a wide array of traditional materials to work with. Ann Weber trained in
clay at California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, her mentor being
the formidable Viola Frey, but after graduation she realized it would be
prohibitively costly to set up her own ceramics studio. So she experimented
with a number of other malleable materials including plaster, paper mache,
and canvas.
After moving to a new studio in East Oakland, she sat contemplating
a pile of leftover cardboard in the middle of the floor. Inspired by the
cardboard furniture of Frank Gehry, she decided to use them for her next
art project. “I wanted to eliminate the cumbersome properties of clay,”
she says, “and cardboard
felt like it had infinite
possibilities.” It was also
readily available— these
days she culls cardboard
boxes from her local
Trader Joe’s. She likes
integrating the properties
of her finds into her work,
whether they be for color,
illustration, or specific
words.
Weber cuts the cardboard
into strips, weaving
them together and
then fastening them
with staples to make
freestanding shapes. “I
could build a 6-foot-tall
sculpture in a day,” she says of her discovery. “They were rough and raw,
which also appealed to me ““ it reminded me of the Arte Povera movement.”
In that Italian movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, artists such as
Marisa Merz and Michelangelo Pistoletto used everyday material, including
textiles and leftover construction material, to make work.
In this exhibition several pieces were inspired by other artists. Weber’s
first college degree was in art history, from Purdue University, and she has
a wealth of art history knowledge percolating in her mind. Three works
make reference to Ellsworth Kelly, the great Minimalist painter, and his
use of primary colors. For Weber, who was taken by his remarkable series
Spectrum, his paintings are not just paintings, but have great presence in
the space they occupy. Another series pays homage to the brilliant Italian
Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Having spent time in Rome as
Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome, she has had a chance to
admire Bernini’s sculpture up close such as the Fountain of the Four Rivers
in the Piazza Navona. She is particularly taken with his dramatic rendering
of drapery, and thus the enfolded twists of After Bernini, Rio de la Plata
(2013).
Her work often becomes anthropomorphic ““ they are like characters from
a story. She herself thinks of them as “biomorphic abstractions.” The
“Personage” series in
particular appeals to her
feeling that one thing
comes from another, that
everything in the world
is connected. The cutout
pieces from one work
become the basis of the
next work. “These pieces
are metaphors for my
life,” Weber says, “perhaps
love affairs or periods
of obstacles.” In the
sculpture Almost (2005),
two tall pieces stand
next to one another, with
curves and recesses that
look like they would fit
together ““ but they don’t
exactly.
One of my favorites is The
Wedding Party (2009), an
installation composed
of seven pieces ranging
in size from 10” tall a
boxy sculpture, perhaps
the wedding gift -- to
a figure 8’ tall. That tall figure and a smaller one are shaped like upsidedown
teardrops, with slender “waists” held up on a rounded base. One can
imagine, given the title of the installation, that they might be the couple
about to be married, with other members of the celebration gathered
around them. Indeed her works are often exuberant and celebratory,
unexpected and witty entities that spring into our presence, and invite us to
share a personal connection with them.
Scarlet Cheng is a Los Angeles based art critic, a regular contributor to publications
such as The Los Angeles Times, Artillery art magazine, and The Art Newspaper. She was
formerly Managing Editor of Asian Art News, a magazine based in Hong Kong, and an
Associate Editor at Time-Life Books, based in Alexandria, VA. Currently, she also teaches
art and film history at Art Center College of Design and Otis College of Art & Design.
Beyond Material
Sculpture of Ann Weber
September 6, 2016 - December 16, 2016
Acknowledgements
Phil Hitchcock, Director
University Library Gallery
Leslie Sartain Rivers, Assistant to the Director
University Library Gallery
Mark Carman, Graphic Design
Finish Line Print Specialists
Scarlet Cheng, Los Angeles Art Writer and Educator
Photo Credits: M. Lee Fatherree and Sibila Savage