For those already acquainted with Elaine Cameron-Weir’s practice, her recent exhibition “Exploded View / Dressing for Windows” at Hannah Hoffman Gallery feels familiarly sterile and sacred, mechanical and magical. Clusters of assemblage sculpture made of concrete, hardware, found objects and natural materials form a chapel-like composition, interconnected and held together by a series of chains and levies. The work titled Dressing for Windows/ Dressing for Altitude/ Dressing for Pleasure features a decrepit fighter jet seat, stainless steel barrels, a bronze statue of the Virgin Mary teetering on the edge of a wheeled cart, and a worn-in leather jacket suspended by meat hooks—all of which evokes medieval and religious iconography the artist returns to time and time again. These cyborg tableaus allude to the body’s relationship to manufactured systems of knowledge and beliefs that can be traced in the past, present and future projections. The sculpture’s mechanical features (wheels and pulleys) suggest movement and points to our potential agency through action. Experiencing Cameron-Weir’s work always seems to bring Hannah Ardent’s philosophy to mind, in which she asks us to notice that “not only the future—the wave of the future—but also the past is seen as a force, and not, as in nearly all out metaphors, as a burden man has to shoulder and of whose dead weight the living can or even must get rid in their march into the future.” Or, as Faulkner puts it, “the past is never dead, it is not even past.”

Hannah Hoffman Gallery
2504 W 7th Street, Suite C
Los Angeles, CA 90057
On view through January 14, 2023