Elaine Cameron-Weir

As a sculptor, Cameron-Weir engages diverse aesthetic styles, merging modern, industrial, and natural designs that emphasize the relationship of the body to surfaces and call attention to phenomena that are both manifest and hidden. Since her earliest works, Cameron-Weir has drawn inspiration from the figure of the aesthete in nineteenth-century Europe as a hallmark of heightened sensory engagement, refined sensitivity to beauty, transgressive sexual desire, and the pursuit of pleasure through artifice or illusion. Aromatic materials and fragrances such as incense are another common feature of Cameron-Weir’s works, and their presence alludes to a history of spiritual, medicinal, or funerary practices, as well as contemporary methods of sensory appeal.

For her exhibition at the New Museum, Cameron-Weir incorporates tools typical of a laboratory to establish a mood of observation and to propose a tension between scientific and occult practices. While her new works evoke a range of associations, they are informed by her study of antiquated scientific texts about vision, medieval armor and torture devices, and early-Renaissance orthopedics—as well as her interest in corporeal symmetry and erogenous zones as aspects of the body forged through human evolution. Cameron-Weir’s installation also draws from the emerging field of sensory archaeology, which questions the privileging of vision in the historical imagination, and aims to enrich speculations about our human ancestors through diverse phenomenological observations.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.