Barbara Weissberger
Solid Objects
The not-so-solid things with which we exist in time.
Pittsburgh & Montana, 2026
Looked at again and again half consciously by a mind thinking of something else, any object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts the brain when we least expect it.Virginia Woolf · “Solid Objects”
In 2022, in my studio at the Montana Artists Refuge in the town of Basin, I began a series of photographs of everyday things. Still under the influence of the isolation and anxieties of the pandemic, I was looking for a daily practice that would use what was readily at hand — mostly things from the kitchen and the studio — and offer a way to make something with immediacy, unselfconsciously. A way to think about time and objects, and to picture objects as a way of imaging human absence. This takes the form of improbable arrangements: things pictured not as we normally use them, but as weird entities in relation to one another.
Weird entities in relation to one another.This series is ongoing, and it informs my shaped quilts. The quilts — photographic print on textile, pieced together with thrift-store-sourced jeans and other materials — also offer a way of considering the uncanny relationship we have with other physical presences: the not-so-solid things with which we exist in time.
A Guggenheim Fellow, working between Pittsburgh and Montana.
Barbara Weissberger lives and works in Pittsburgh and, sometimes, Montana. Her work has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship and residencies including MacDowell, Yaddo, Ragdale, Bogliasco, Camargo, Ucross, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Montana Artists Refuge — where the Solid Objects photographs began.
She has exhibited at PS1/MoMA, White Columns, The Drawing Center, and Project Artspace in New York; the Mattress Factory and Silver Eye in Pittsburgh; and the Missoula Art Museum, among others. Her writing has appeared in Contact Sheet and is forthcoming in Salt Hill, and she is one half of the collaborative duo ALDRICH + WEISSBERGER. She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and is Teaching Professor Emerita at the University of Pittsburgh.