Amy M. Weiss
acrazyraisin@yahoo.com

Artist Statement

Since moving to Philadelphia I have been thinking about cities and the communities they create. How do we interact with each other and the buildings around us? How do our cities shape these interactions? There are thousands of people living in the city, side by side, and yet we know only a fraction of those people. Small communities form, and people are included in or excluded from those communities. I find myself constantly struggling to walk the line between groups of people, slipping in and out of many different circles, but not living entirely in any of them. It is this struggle that has been fueling my work. I am both inside and outside.

When I first discovered computer circuits they seemed to be the perfect medium for my work. The circuit boards appear to be miniature cities, each piece is connected to the other; each piece performs a specific task. It is this digital network that we use to talk to one another, and a new way of forming communities has begun to take shape in this cyber world. We are connected to people on the other side of the world, but isolated from those living in the space surrounding us.

In my recent sculpture, old computer cases are transformed into abstract apartments and buildings, and the patterns on circuit boards function as the grid of the city streets. Small figures placed inside the computer cities are unexpected. We stumble upon the figures in the same manner that we come upon moments in our everyday lives, moments when we step outside of ourselves and observe the world around us. Once we have found a lone figure, we cannot help but wonder if there is another. It is this search for the minute figures amongst the vast metal city that engages us within the miniature world, and we find that moment of disconnect where we straddle the line that separates ourselves from our observations. We become both the observer and the observed.