dye sublimation on poly poplin, cotton and synthetic fabric, jeans, thread, grommets, 24h x 34w inches, 2025
Barbara Weissberger
ADA Gallery will open this Friday, February 6th, (6pm-?) with the ongoing exhibition Potato Poems by Pittsburgh artsit, Barbara Weissberger. Featuring a new installation of photographs from her ongoing series All The Time Not In The World.
Weissberger’s engagement with the potato emerged from a search for a form that could stand in for the body without representing one. She was drawn to the potato as a still-life figure: humble, lumpy, global, and bound to survival. Its skin, flesh, and “eyes” speak a bodily language of earthiness and vulnerability. Food, Weissberger notes, is never outside of economies, even when homegrown or foraged, whether as an act of self-reliance, refusal, or necessity. Potato Poems brings together quilts that exist somewhere between image and sculptural object. With irregular contours suggesting movement, instability, and change, each quilt functions as a kind of body, present without being literal. Weissberger begins with staged photographs, printed on poly poplin or translated into woven tapestry, which are then cut and sewn together with salvaged materials. These include fragments of worn blue jeans bearing the imprint of bodies that once inhabited them, along with other textiles. The resulting assemblages emphasize touch, wear, and intimacy, embedding traces of lived experience directly into the fabric of the work.
As mentioned, we are expanding the current exhibits to include photographs from her series, All The Time Not In The World. This ongoing series begun during the isolation and introspection of the pandemic years. Each photograph is titled with the date it was made and documents a transient arrangement Weissberger calls a “precarious stack” or an “absurdist joke.” Made at a pace of no more than one per day, using whatever materials were at hand, the photographs point to domestic life and the studio, reflecting on attachment, absence, and the lives of things beyond our use of them.
The title All The Time Not In The World comes from a passage by Margaret Atwood, quoted by Ali Smith, “‘The act of writing takes place at the moment when Alice passes through the mirror. At this one instant, the glass barrier between the doubles dissolves, and Alice is neither here nor there, neither art nor life, neither the one thing nor the other, though at the same time she is all of these at once. At that moment time itself stops, and also stretches out, and both writer and reader have all the time not in the world. Of course, the mirror is a picture plane and like the mirror’s glass surface the surface of the photograph separates here and there, art and life, one thing and the other. To extend the comparison, the viewer’s gaze is Alice jumping through the picture plane, dissolving separation. The photograph itself stops and stretches time. Artist and viewer “have all the time not in the world.”
Barbara Weissberger’s work has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, numerous artist residencies in the US and abroad including Yaddo, MacDowell, Camargo, Bogliasco, Ucross, the Ragdale Foundation, the Hambidge Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has been exhibited at such venues as The Drawing Center, PS1/MoMA, White Columns, Project Artspace, NYC; Catskill Artspace, Livingston Manor; Hallwalls, Buffalo; Gridspace, Brooklyn; Silver Eye, The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; ADA Gallery, Richmond; and The Missoula Art Museum, Missoula. Her work has been written about in journals including Femme Art Review and The Heavy Collective. She is part of the collaborative duo ALDRICH + WEISSBERGER. She received an M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute. She was born in New Jersey, lived in San Francisco and New York before moving to Pittsburgh. She divides her time between Pittsburgh, New York, and Montana.
See Barbara's latest exhibitions
Twenty Two Candles
THIS IS NOT A SOCK
Untitled Miami
Potato Poems
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