Today we’d like to introduce you to Mia Weiner.
Hi Mia, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I grew up in Chicago and was lucky to be exposed to lots of art as a child. My mother, along with exposing me to the arts, is clinical psychologist which directly influenced my work. Spending my childhood surrounded by Hindu imagery left a great impact on how I think about figuration, along with regularly attending the ballet as kid where my uncle was the conductor.
As a child, I begged for sewing lessons even though no one knew how to stitch in my house and the moment I began working with textiles, my body felt connected to that mode of making. I went to The Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) for my BFA in Fiber and then spent a handful of years in New York making art, working at galleries, doing odd jobs, and at one point flirted with fashion when I was an embroidery consultant for Opening Ceremony. I had been putting off grad school because I didn’t wanted to leave Brooklyn but was finally ready to take my practice to the next level and moved to Chicago for my MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. That’s where I met the loom which changed my life.
My practice has always dealt with issues surrounding the body, gender, identity, and intimacy, and cloth always felt like the perfect material to talk about these places of connection and tension and closeness.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
IT’S BEEN A WILD ROLLERCOASTER, but I have loved every minute of it. I am so grateful for each struggle and bump along the road, they have really helped me reset, reevaluate, learn, and course correct. I think one of the most major bumps in the past couple of years was losing access to the loom I was working on during the pandemic. At the time, it felt like a devastating loss, but I decided to take a giant leap of faith in myself and invest in my own. A gallery I was working with offered me a free studio space for a year since I needed to figure out where to house it, but only if I was able to come out to LA. That’s really why I moved out here and am so glad I did. LA has really shifted my work. The light, the color, the sky, the space. It has been really expansive in the way I have been thinking about image, color, and scale. I am so thankful for the sunshine, for my community, for the art that I am surrounded by here.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I weave intimate declarations of tangled bodies and monochrome spaces in response to moments in art history, the psychology of human relationships, and dreaming.
I think a lot about the way an arm curves around a back, the way it feels to float in water, a deep breath, the subtle energy body, an image that gets stuck in my head. After dreaming about shape or feeling or color, I take photographs of bodies that I choreograph in space (alongside my own). From these digital images, I begin to adjust the composition, removing, editing, and adding information. Once the image feels ready, I break the photograph down and map how to weave it, coding and planning every crossing of every thread every row. I sometimes forget how much work is digital and done on the computer before I move to the loom to weave the physical tapestry but I love this play between object and image, the digital and the haptic. When I weave, I like to weave uninterrupted for hours. Weaving has become a bit of a meditative act for me and I consciously activate the cloth with energy, including Reiki energy, while I am weaving. It is always a magic moment removing the tapestries from the loom and getting to see the full piece since I only can see about 3 feet of it at a time while I work.
We’re always looking for the lessons that can be learned in any situation, including tragic ones like the Covid-19 crisis. Are there any lessons you’ve learned that you can share?
To follow your gut. To move to the sunshine (LA). To really take space for yourself.
Along with a giant life reset, a new body of work was born as a result of being locked down in Chicago during the very first months of the pandemic that I am still responding to today. In Chicago when COVID hit, there was snow outside (or even worse, too cold to snow) and the huge house plant craze emerged. I think we needed something to care for and tend to, something green to be around. Caring for these plants also seemed to match the shift in time that we were experiencing in a really interesting way. I thought a lot about these ‘domestic jungles’ that we were making and lounging. We all the sudden had a very new relationship to leisure being stuck in our homes and began thinking a lot about painters like Gaugin and the constructed jungles that were being depicted with sexualized women often painted as if they were objects. I was interested in recreating these ‘jungles’ and instead being the woman creating the composition, in control of my own image, in control of the gaze. How to have the bodies in space be captured in moments of tenderness, moments of power, and no matter what for the bodies to maintain agency. That idea danced in my head for a couple of months and when I moved to LA I was surrounded by so much green that the color seeped into me and felt ready to begin working on that series of tapestries.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.miaweiner.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/miaweiner/
Image Credits
Images courtesy of the artist, studio portrait by Daniel Leeds
