Ennoia (Performing the Water), 2003 Color print, limited edition. View of six-hour immersion: cast-concrete vessel, water, artist's body. Collection Enid McKenna Soifer, New York. Courtesy Remy Toledo Gallery, New York. Photo: Quyen Tran. Limen/Meadow (Achea Rheon), 2004 Instalation: newsprint paper, wood, projected video, artist's body, sound in collaboration with Stephen Vitiello and Matthew Griffin. Courtesy of Chelsea Art Museum, New York. Photo: Hermann Feldhaus. Through drawing, sculpture, performance, video, and installation, New York based Polish-American artist Monika Weiss creates environments that relate to the body and to the space it inhabits between biology and culture. In her drawings an anonymous, alienated silhouette appears, posturing in undefined states of waiting, or reacting to the unknown. In her performative installations, the viewer encounters scenes of repetition and ritual, counterpoised by projected video documenting the action. In one of the Weiss’ recent installation series Ennoia the artist immerses herself for several hours inside a water-filled chalice, while a projected image of the immersion and the underwater sounds mirror her action. Such works combine the qualities of endurance and duration with symbolic form reminiscent of medieval paintings and with the formal simplicity of Minimalism. Weiss' installations are structured as a counterpoint between technological media (video projection) and the ancient activity of drawing, which is presented in "a primal state inseparable from the body as a whole. The experience of time is not end-driven but steady and enduring, establishing and deepening the human presence. Recently she has been exploring the prostrate body as an apparently paradoxical sign of resistance to oppressive and militaristic cultures." (Guy Brett, 2007) In this group of projects, such as Phlegethon-Milczenie, the artist lies onto surfaces which have properties related to human skin, such as paper, as well as those which are charged with cultural and historical meaning such as open books published in Germany before 1945. “I like to remove the beginning and the end from the experience, both from others’, and mine leaving just the space. That's why I want to come back for many hours, for days, creating a site of eternal return, a kind of a loop in time, a situation,nevertheless permeated by gradual, almost invisible change, to create a place where people come and go, encounter something that happens almost the same, and almost all the time. Just like life itself. Like a grid in time and in space. Hours, days, the change of light. There is this gradual change, like getting tired, like the way we disappear. I have not used my own body until the last several years, when I began to feel a tremendous need for presence of body. I was obsessively drawing a silhouette curled-up inside a chalice, viewed from above. The octagonal black whole with just a contour of body, contained, along the edges of the opening. The tension between my presence and the presence of an object, and the presence of others, are related through the idea of containing and being contained, the way my body is both a container and an object contained, the way buildings are vessels, prone to overflow. Water, video and sound are sites of mirroring. They are reflective, they multiply and alter. What happens between the body and its trace creates a new quality.” Read full interview Baptism of Water: Conversation on Ennoia (Performing the Water) Monika Weiss + William Anastasi Monika Weiss: Vessels 2004