ENJOY house (2018-2019)

ENJOY house presents forms of escapist amusement as hostile and uninhabitable environments. Subjects and spaces are produced in the pursuit of ideals, where sites for entertainment are fashioned by their shortcomings. Through the negation of color, this series focuses on how the construction of fantasy inevitably entails its own failure.

An absence emerges from the cumulation of disparate places and their visitors, all of whom become actors participating in the same theater. This theater consists of costumed spaces that take on the appearance of purgatories rather than playgrounds. By photographing moments of authenticity at the height of artifice, I look at the ways people manufacture themselves to conform to the props that surround and confine them. The discovery in each picture lies in the decontextualization of activity, where nonperformances take center stage and expectations of glamour evacuate in the physicalization of desire. The formal simplicity of greyscale attests to this symbolic power, emphasizing a generation’s inheritance of a modern empty experience.

Shelli Weiler is an artist from New York with a BA in Studio Art from Wesleyan University, where she studied photography among other digital arts practices. Her work primarily revolves around the production of fantasy and its failure, using portraiture to document performance in a non-documentarian way. She is currently based in Brooklyn with Basil the tabby cat.

To see more of Shelli’s work, visit her site: shelliweiler.com

& follow along on Instagram: @s.h.e.l.l.i