The Whole Shebang
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Weiss Bleiweiss is a gender non-conforming multidisciplinary artist from Orange County, California. Bleiweiss seeks to explore the vast range of dualities present in our reality. From the dichotomies of contemporary life chaos and order, to life and death, they hope to glean contentment with the duality present in their personal life. Bleiweiss comes from a rich mixed heritage that makes navigating a current polarizing political climate difficult. Through various output, they aspire to find balance in the oppositional.
Bleiweiss is currently earning a BFA in Drawing/Painting and a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado Boulder. They graduated from the Orange County School of the Arts, in the Creative Writing conservatory. Their work has been featured in Inkblot Magazine, Outfront Magazine, and self-publishing on their art-devoted social media platform. Aside from their practice as a fine artist, Bleiweiss also curates multiple online platforms devoted to the exploration of the avant-garde through makeup and vintage fashion.
THE BEAUTY OF LIMINALITY
I’m enamored by liminality. There is a seductive, almost sensual quality towards the in-between as being something sentient. The weight of tension between life and death, or pain and pleasure, that sits in your stomach like a Sisyphysian boulder, is one of the remaining universal languages by which we not only communicate, but survive. I perceive dichotomous liminality as a fully-fledged being to create a relationship with; someone to be respected and admired as easily as it can be marred and manipulated. My body work would be unsuccessful if a viewer only derived a single emotion or interpretation from my attempts to create in the in-between.
This conceptualization of dichotomy as an attractive- in-between stems from my lifelong struggle with living unstably; from a childhood spent packing up a duffle bag every few days between divorced parents, to feeling like an imposter between each of my mixed heritage’s cultures, to queerness, I’ve come to regard our ability to empathize despite differences as our greatest strength in inciting change en masse. I’ve found that the depths and degrees of variation among each of our respective interiorities are often the very mechanisms by which we isolate ourselves - and if not isolate, then generate conflict. It is the eternal quest of an artist of any kind, but particularly storytellers, to empower audiences in identifying themselves with the character. How can one translate their private voice to their public voice, much in the same way readers are enamored by fiction and nonfiction alike? The allure of the protagonist is also the beauty of being human; to be able to see ourselves, and our struggles, in the endeavors of others. To laugh and cry along with them, because their success or failure is a testament to ours. To find kinship in our complex emotional states is not only a mark of our tenacity to grow, but progress. Thus, I use liminality and dichotomy as a tool for empathy-based change, combining different emotional states into a singular piece.
Passion for fashion
The beautiful and bizarre excite me. Whether it's in the diverse artistry of the avant-garde, or the century-defining aesthetics of 60s-90s fashion, I'm in love with using our bodies as canvases for creativity in our own rights.
Color and individuality is slowly being leached from the world. Recent studies indicate that as our society quickly progresses to a more streamlined, technological, and urbanized world, so does color in architecture, vehicles, and clothes to streamline efficient production. As an artist and a lover of fashion, this disturbs me. And so, my mission to bring life back into the everyday begins with the fabric "armor" I don every morning...
Part of my artistry in curating fashion from an almost entirely thrifted/vintage/handmade wardrobe is in experimenting with the creativity of limitation - in other words, creating multiple ensembles and energies using the same clothing components. i think some of the most disheartening facets of fast fashion today are the beliefs that every outfit we don must be new, or a fear of being judged for wearing something twice, or a compulsion to consume clothing that reflects “trends” and “popular” aesthetics. while my collection is very large in part to these capitalistic facets of clothing consumption, i actively work to dispel these beliefs by doing what i do: by pushing the preconceptions of “drag” by performing my own versions of the “fantasy”, by using bodily self-expression as an armor to deal with each day, by living in my mindset of our bodies and faces being canvases for our creative pursuits, happiness, and uniqueness.
