WORTHLESSSTUDIOS launching the WARP residency with UAP
On September 26th, WORTHLESSTUDIOS officially launched its Artist Residency Program (WARP), in partnership with UAP (Urban Art Projects). The residency is the first of its kind, offering an unprecedented infrastructure of support for an emerging sculptor; with Canadian artist Elaine Cameron-Weir as the program’s inaugural resident.
The WARP launch was celebrated with a tour of UAP Pollich Tallix, a fine art foundry that provides artists with the industrial capabilities to realize their work. Over the years they have collaborated with artists from Alexander Calder to Jeff Koons. This was a rare inside look at the ambitious process of fine sculpture making.
On the massive foundry floor stood dozens of works in progress, some of them easily recognizable and strictly under NDA. I was taken by the grounded rhythm of the anonymous metal workers as they labored to bring these half-formed figures to life. It was a striking show of the immense collaborative effort that it takes to make a single artist’s creative vision a reality.
Work of this scope, which begs for a large public audience, also reveals that the perverse impulse to own a work of art is a misguided one. Artists of any medium can attest that the object which is left over for us to gawk at, is only the byproduct of something that has already happened. Never fully complete. Like the shavings from a sharpened pencil, or a banana peel. The true value of the work lies in how the artist themselves changed internally through the process.
The materiality of the work, what we can witness, is only what has been left behind as proof of what may have moved inside the artist. This proof is still valuable because having the indelible fingerprints of the movement of one spirit, it stirs within us this potential for movement.
What is sculpture then, if not something akin to an abandoned house or village? Evidence of both the souls that once moved there together in its making, and of those who will be moved as they pass through them in viewing.
A sculpture can define how a city or generation sees itself, and takes on new life depending on the moment in which it is viewed. The function of the sculptor, and the anonymous laborers, is not in the fabrication of a material object, but in the large-scale movement of spirit. They midwife our own internal movements, and remind us that the question of being human is not one of material, but of what to do with that force which animates the material.
This is precisely the realm in which Elaine Cameron-Weir’s work lives. She plays with movement and texture, and the social structures which seek to stifle them, in a way that feels vivid. The tension that ripples through her pieces is enough to make one excited for what will come out of the larger scope of this residency.
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