Tali Weinberg

In "All Possible Futures," Karey Kessler and Tali Weinberg use text, data, maps, and washes of color to trace relationships between places, times, bodies, and psyche. In a loud and fractious world of intersecting crises, each artist, in their own way, confronts loss while holding on to the possibility of alternate futures.

Kessler creates map paintings on mulberry paper and the bark of Sitka spruce trees. Each mark reflects what it means to live in a fractured, noisy world while still striving to listen for the whispers of nature, memory, and time that lie just beneath the surface. By combining fragments of language, street grids, topographies, and washes of watercolor, she interweaves disparate places, times, and voices. Her paintings reach from the present to deep time, from earth to cosmos, and from loss to possibility. Their map-like forms act, at once, as a stable and unstable ground for felt, lived experiences of this world in all of its complexities, contradictions, worries, and hopes. They are ethereal and grounded. They are maps of the seemingly unmappable.

Weinberg shreds, spins, and weaves discarded New York Times Magazines to metabolize the climate, health, and social crises featured in their pages. She pairs the resulting tactile color fields with poetic text fragments saved from the cover articles. The woven pages become spaces for reflection while attending to the limitations of language and the splintered ways we often consume news. 

Also included is a piece from Weinberg's decade-long project transforming NOAA climate data into weaving and sculpture–a response to the vulnerability of climate knowledge, bodies, and ecosystems in the face of leaders prioritizing extraction over all else. The data in this piece, color-coded as plant- and insect-dyed linen, is interwoven with petrochemical-derived fishing line, resulting in a semi-transparent textile that shimmers like water. Large-in-scale and suspended in space, visitors view each other through this screen, connecting rising temperatures, fossil fuels, and plastic proliferation to their impact on the human body.

Made as practices of both grieving and care, Kessler's maps and Weinberg's news- and data-embedded color fields communicate beyond what we expect from these reference materials. Incorporating paper, thread, bark, and plastic, these works make space for a kind of knowing that is expansive, relational, and deeply felt.