Ann Weber’s Witty Life-Size Cardboard Sculptures Play with Disequilibrium in Evocative Balancing Acts

Ann Weber: Let the Sunshine In, Main Gallery installation view. PHOTO: Greg Bell Studio Nine.

By LITA BARRIE November 8, 2024

Ann Weber loves to create something from nothing. She jokes that growing up a Westerner from Indiana, “we could make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” a defiant rejection of Jonathan Swift’s proverbial saying. Inspired by Frank Gehry’s acclaimed corrugated cardboard furniture series (Easy Edges, 1972) - especially the iconic Wiggle Chair and Arte Povera’s radical use of unconventional materials - Weber set out to show that humble cardboard boxes can be transformed into something of higher aesthetic value. By simply applying polyurethane to cardboard strips, she creates a satiny shine that elevates the discarded material, an effect she likens to the shininess of patent leather shoes.

Weber is a crossover artist from a craft world background who spent years in upstate New York making functional pottery. She relocated to California in the mid-1980s to gain her MFA and then turned to cardboard as a sculptural material. Her down-to-earth approach to sculpture is informed by decades of working with her hands, making shapes from balls of clay. Using a box cutter to create these cardboard strips - rather like the coil pots of clay she used to enlarge on a potter’s wheel - she staples them together with a plier stapler, to make thousands of rows which creates a studded texture. Weber combines circles and cylinders to make a funnel shape turned upside down in a witty subversion of abstract formalism. She transforms these into biomorphic abstraction and curvaceous Personages that recall Nikki de Saint Phalle’s monumental plaster and papier-mâché, Nanas. Weber’s tactile understanding of materials and sensitivity to shapes is infused with a contagious sense of humor. Her figurative Personages lean together but a bit off-kilter, in groups or pairs - recalling humorous soap opera scenes. Weber plays with disequilibrium in evocative balancing acts which have open-ended meanings.

Ann Weber, Personages, Love and Happiness, 2024, found cardboard, staples, polyurethane, 96 x 44 x 10 in

Most of her cardboard boxes are foraged from Trader Joe’s and even the Cheesecake Factory. Weber leaves in place the apertures, cut-in handle openings, logos and freight numbers which are so intrinsic to grocery and wine cartons. She also leaves an occasional piece of cardboard in its raw state to contrast with the polyurethaned sections in a play on presentation and vulnerability, strength and fragility, art and utility. Although these precariously balanced pieces look as though they could topple over, they are held in place by a hidden small steel base. Interestingly, they can last for up to 150 years.

Weber is known for her monochromatic white sculptures and black-and-white sculptures, but this exhibition, Let The Sun Shine In, is a foray into bold primary colors - even with an homage to Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column. The main impetus comes from Barnet Newman’s painting series Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue (1966 - 1970), which was a confrontation with Piet Mondrian and De Stijl whom Newman thought had made a didactic idea out of combining the three primary colors instead of using them as an expression of freedom. Weber, who is an unpretentious hippie at heart, and in the spirit of freedom Newman advocated, broke free of her own self-imposed rules of using the inherent qualities of materials and started painting the cardboard strips for the first time to add pizazz and vitality. Four wall pieces in a series - Who’s (I’m) Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue 1 (After Barnet Newman) (2024) - are paired vessel shapes; these feature matching contours in a choreographed interplay of positive and negative space with the exuberant dynamism of sexual attraction. Two life-size free-standing pairs - Personages, Love and Happiness (2024) and Personages, Elkhart Lake (2024) - lean toward each other and away from each other like a lovebirds’ tiff, further exploring the irresistible attraction between male and female bodies captivated by the dynamics of sexual alchemy. 

Ann Weber, The Wedding Party, 2009, found cardboard, staples, polyurethane, 96 x 144 x 144 in

Two of her earlier whimsical monochromatic white free-standing sculpture groupings - For the Love of FLW (2011) and The Wedding Party (2009) - are the most haunting pieces in the main gallery. These two graceful groupings of elemental circles, cylinders and funnels (the latter combining the circle and cylinder) have a subtlety and refinement that is quietly understated, yet so metaphorically layered that they can be read as organic vessels, plant pods, figurines or even space capsules. However, it is left to the captivated viewer to find further meanings that personally resonate with them as they walk around the work. Weber is indefatigable, continuing to build upon her rich background of combining art and craft with the influence of her art historical antecedents. For decade after decade, she has made increasingly stronger work - informed by the feminine wisdom she has acquired with maturity - because she continues to pursue the endless possibilities of the same powerful foundational shapes. Even though this is her modus operandi, she still has a lot of fun in the process.  WM

Let the Sunshine In
Palos Verdes Art Center
September 14 through November 16, 2024