Rebecca Weed
Cody, WY
Exhibit Year: 2016-2017
About the Artist
Rebecca Weed was born and raised in Cody, WY. She received her MFA from The University of Montana in 2010. She has participated in National and International group shows. One of her paintings lives in the private collection of Montana Museum of Art and Culture in Missoula, MT. She currently teaches at Northwest College in Powell, WY, does her best to help run an art supply store and public studio space, and paints and draws every other minute.
Artist Statement
When I work I am thinking about permanence and impermanence, I am thinking about time and the way we measure it, and I am thinking about what is beautiful.
Growing up in Wyoming I was always aware of the horizon. This long view effected my visual aesthetic in many ways. For a time, I was mostly fascinated by the intersection of life and air. I worked with ideas of veils and lines and “passing through”. These ideas always acted as a background for heavy autobiographical paintings. About things that are not permanent.
It was when I moved back to Wyoming that I began to think about how we tell stories visually. How important is that HORIZON in any story?
In Wyoming the day to day quietness of life is pervasive. My town is surrounded by prairies and plateaus and long long stretches of air and rock. You can sit and experience nothing for hours. NOTHING. It is wonderful.
I find that in the quiet stretches a very mundane act can be explosive. A small choice can turn an empty desert day into a real happening. While my work is still autobiographical in nature; I am choosing to tell my stories in that quiet Wyoming way. Line by line. With little marks to say “something could happen here.” I want to see the visual story laid out in a different way. Not a single stand still MOMENT. But, a little stretch of time. With hiccups.
If I feel any certainty about what might be important in regional western art, it is our depiction of time. From the great painters who could depict the end of the day with a few pale yellow strokes, or the artists who casts bronze figures from a long gone era to the woman in her shop shellacking old work gloves to depict our current agricultural crisis we are all looking to TIME for content.
Right now I guess I’m trying to get in on that time.
~ The beauty is in what we do measure, what we can’t measure and what we forget to measure.