Understories, Similar Veins
Bingham Gallery, University of Missouri, Sept 17-Oct 15, 2024
Forests and watersheds, lungs and arteries. Each is an element of life-sustaining circulatory systems. But as these systems move water, oxygen, and nutrients through bodies, they also circulate the byproducts of the fossil-fuel and chemical-intensive systems we live within. The weavings and sculptures in “Understories, Similar Veins” make tangible the interconnected harms that extraction inflicts on humans and the earth, from rising temperatures and plastic proliferation to species loss and illness. Weinberg follows these connections through the systems and structures of weaving, the vascular systems of bodies and trees, the flows of watersheds, and streams of news and data.
Silhouettes of endangered tree species woven from plastic and plant-derived fibers are suspended as gauzy shrouds in forms that resemble lungs and roots. Tourniquets—once intended to slow bleeding, now expired petrochemical-derived waste—are coiled into tree rings. Rivers of plastic medical tubing are entwined with color-coded data, materializing perilously rising temperatures. And New York Times magazines are shredded, spun, and woven into tactile color fields to metabolize the climate and health crises featured in their pages. Together, these works retrace and reimagine relationships between corporeal and ecological bodies and between loss and futurity.
