Heist Gallery is pleased to announce, “Holy Blitz, Data and Dust,” the first New York solo exhibition by Sadie Weis.

For this exhibition, Weis presents two large-scale paintings – one formatted horizontally and one vertically – alongside a series of silkscreens on Mylar. In each work, Weis gradually expands her vision of the post-apocalypse by setting up a field in which the different dialects of rural and urban landscape painting can openly engage and communicate with one another. Common to each work is a central mountainous form that begins to slip away from the exact texture and material nature of planet earth. That they share a resemblance with our own world, with our own preconceptions of landscape painting, only serves to further complicate Weis’s vision, for these rising, arching ‘masses’, now purple, now red, appear to have survived the end-all, be-all demolition. As such, these ‘masses’ could just as easily be conglomerations of vapors as they are heaps of consumerist debris. Perhaps the slippage continues between the material and the immaterial, with these jagged, crystalline forms, accumulations of raw energy, of un-tapped possibility? How about mountains of memories, the landscape of a common unconscious? In these startling paintings and silkscreens, she renders what she is envisioning, and because sight does not necessarily involve recognition, the open-ended nature of Weis’s project seems to relish in the competing nature of readings and meanings. Weis identifies as herself ‘an extreme sensory machine, in constant awe of all things that are tactile, strange, and foreign…be it the dirty dogs and rats and fishy trash in Chinatown…or feeling enamored with the brightly colored yet dirty dusty signs and strorefronts and smudgy neon lights.”

“Sadie’s paintings and silk screens are simply, and beautifully, passionate. They are filled with intense, frenetic lines; intense, super saturated colors; and intense, nearly cataclysmic, energies” Heist Gallery owner Talia Eisneberg says. “By combining the rebellious elements of graffiti with the refined aspects of pastoral landscape painting, I feel like Sadie’s vision redefines urban landscape painting and argues for a new understanding of the competing languages of our found environment.”

Equally significant as the rendered landscape is to painting’s ultimate success is the signs of its making. By employing the language of the urban landscape – graffiti – Weis enacts or performs the subversion action of vandalism in an attempt to rescue the relevance of personal experience and expression within the confines of constructed space. Graffiti, for all its negative connotations, can be also seen as a quite beautiful gesture to humanize an otherwise bleak, nearly uninhabitable environment. The life force of her mark-making seems to depend on the nervous rhythm that emerges from the use of spray paint to structure both the surface’s under and over drawing. The areas where Weis allows the technical collapse of oil paint and spray paint into an inseparable visual entity seems rather symbolic of the various other modes of resolution occurring within the pictorial field.

After completing her BFA in painting from Kansas in 2005, Weis moved to New York City. She has exhibited at Scope Art Fair, and has been included in various other group shows. For the past 9 months Weis has been involved in a residency program in Berlin.