Phlegethon-Milczenie, 2005 Single-channel video, sculptural installation, photography, sound composition. Collection CIFO, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami. Keimai 3, 2008 Single-channel video, sculptural installation, photography, sound composition. Collection Fauenmuseum, Bonn. RECENT NEWS Artist in Residence, Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland, 2009 View website to learn more. 2009 Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Work, New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) View website to learn more. ....................................................... "In her drawings and multi-media installations, combined with performance and sound, New York-based artist Monika Weiss explores physical properties of the act of drawing, which she combines with references to the ancient and medieval symbols and concepts of the world and the human being. In Weiss' works all formal means are subordinated to one major objective: awareness of presence and, conversely, of absence; in her work, the artist often demarcates the given space with materials such as water, canvas, sculpted objects, historical artifacts, projected video, sound environment and her own body. Recurring motifs in her works are octagonal spaces, acts of lying down in an embryo-like position, immersions and the outlining of one's body. In her installation and photography series Phlegethon-Milczenie (2005-2006), printed before the Second World War books serve as objects onto which the artist crawls and draws, outlining the world around her body with her eyes purposefully closed." (Susan Hoeltzel "Introduction" in "Monika Weiss: Five Rivers," Lehman College Art Gallery) "In her work, the tremulous private body - her body and, by implication, my body - is best understood as a space in between, a permeable membrane held taut between two polarities in the personae of two Muses, Mnemosyne and Lethe (...) Weiss's signature understanding of temporality bears a striking resemblance to that of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty: a sense of time as an institution, a system of equivalences with infinite interstices... Her large-scale drawings in a continuing series of harrowing representations of her own body in a curled-up or standing positions, invoke and provoke the reversibility which is integral to her manner of working, whatever the medium, and are always predicated on the medium of her own body as best conduit of expression and shifting shadow between the visible and the invisible, the seer and the seen." (James D. Campbell "Drawing on Syncope: The Performativity of Rapture in the Art of Monika Weiss") READ FULL ESSAY "The linking of drawing with the editing of video is a particular characteristic of Monika Weiss's work. Both have a very personal touch, and, in both, the result is to create not so much a depiction as a presence. The video image is not "of" her, but seems to arise from her own offering of herself, the result of some alchemy between the unmanned camera's surveying, cold, motionless eye and the emotion brought to the editing process. The birds-eye view serves to create a site, a space, separated from the rest of the environment, a graphic world. On the horizontal plane the body's movement itself takes on a graphic quality: outside the world and inside the drawing." (Guy Brett "Time Being") READ FULL ESSAY