The Soft State of Custodia
Eleanor Aldrich & Barbara Weissberger
DECEMBER 2019
Custodia is the ongoing collaborative project of Eleanor Aldrich and Barbara Weissberger. Accomplished independent artists in their own right, Custodia is an evolving dialogue between a material-driven painter and image-making sculptor. This work relies on each artist’s individual methodology to create installations that come together in a playful negotiation. A disjointed theatricality gives way to a liberation of individually authored works that diffuse mediums ranging from digital photography, felt fibers, painting, and mixed media sculpture. The Soft State of Custodia is the first exhibition in our new curatorial season, supported by Fine Foundation and PNC Charitable Trusts.
Mops, drains, buckets, rags, dustpans, brooms, vacuum cleaners and other tools of cleaning and maintenance form the central imagery of CUSTODIA. Cleaning tools are liminal; dirty in that they are always touching things that are dirty, but necessary for cleanliness. The banal is blurred with the mystical, the chore with the compulsion to create. Dirty and abject things may appear authentic and trustworthy in that they are by definition non-seductive and contain no outer shell of artifice, which infers some interior meaning–though the clutter is arranged, and colors are chosen.
In this newest installation, the artists grapple with the ghost-like presence of the pandemic-now an additional layer in the backdrop of our world. This presence has diffused most all congregations of people into the internet to work and play and watch and buy. Beyond the technology that has enabled our shifting connectivity is our experience of public space and home. Who works-from-home? Has our context of domestic labor shifted away from feminine work?
In this new age we were introduced to the “essential-business” and “essential-workers” exposing our essential needs and laying them quite bare. Custodia has in turn become a soft space; its softness a gesture against autocratic impulses. It is a sealed space, empty of people, mimicking a closed down house where softly draped forms shelter in place. Here, notions of cleanliness and contamination exist on a continuum of chore and compulsion, serenity and threat. Through illusion, irreverence, and absurd humor, Aldrich and Weissberger dove into this territory.
Essay in Bunker Review
Mops, drains, buckets, rags, dustpans, brooms, vacuum cleaners and other tools of cleaning and maintenance form the central imagery of CUSTODIA. Cleaning tools are liminal; dirty in that they are always touching things that are dirty, but necessary for cleanliness. The banal is blurred with the mystical, the chore with the compulsion to create. Dirty and abject things may appear authentic and trustworthy in that they are by definition non-seductive and contain no outer shell of artifice, which infers some interior meaning–though the clutter is arranged, and colors are chosen.
In this newest installation, the artists grapple with the ghost-like presence of the pandemic-now an additional layer in the backdrop of our world. This presence has diffused most all congregations of people into the internet to work and play and watch and buy. Beyond the technology that has enabled our shifting connectivity is our experience of public space and home. Who works-from-home? Has our context of domestic labor shifted away from feminine work?
In this new age we were introduced to the “essential-business” and “essential-workers” exposing our essential needs and laying them quite bare. Custodia has in turn become a soft space; its softness a gesture against autocratic impulses. It is a sealed space, empty of people, mimicking a closed down house where softly draped forms shelter in place. Here, notions of cleanliness and contamination exist on a continuum of chore and compulsion, serenity and threat. Through illusion, irreverence, and absurd humor, Aldrich and Weissberger dove into this territory.
Essay in Bunker Review
Film by Ivette Spradlin
