A survey exhibition of Polish-born, New York-based artist Monika Weiss. Five Rivers presents an overview of the artist’s works created between 1999 and 2005, with a focus on new performative installations and her most recent drawing series. Weiss’ work is often site-specific, combining sculpture, live action, video projection and sound environment. During the last six years the artist has produced a large number of new works and has been widely shown in the United States and Europe.

In her multi-media installations, combined with performance, Monika Weiss explores physical properties of the act of drawing, which she combines with references to the ancient and medieval symbols and concepts of the world and the human being. Weiss uses her own body directly in her art as both the maker and the inhabitant of the artistic object. In Ennoia, she immerses herself for several hours inside a water-filled chalice, while a projected image of the immersion and the underwater sounds mirror her action. In Intervals, she creates drawing landscapes that are spaces, which others may enter and fill with their own actions.

Monika Weiss was born in Poland and lives in New York City. Her most recent exhibitions included Between Presence and Performative Memory at WYSPA Art Institute, Gdansk; Phlegethon-Milczenie at the Inter-Galerie, Potsdam (Berlin); Drawing the City (Day One, Day Two) at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art; Monika Weiss: Performing the Drawing at Galerie Samuel Lallouz, Montreal; and Vessels at the Chelsea Art Museum, New York. In 2006 her installation Ennoia will be a part of You Won’t Feel a Thing at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. Weiss received a master’s degree in painting and drawing from the Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw in 1990. She was a visiting artist at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago (2002); University of Maryland (1999); Georgia State University School of Art and Design (1997-98); Spelman College (1996), Atlanta; and Strzeminski Academy of Fine Arts (1994-95), Lodz, Poland. Monika Weiss’ recent New York exhibition Intervals (2004) was presented at the Remy Toledo Gallery together with Carolee Schneemann’s Infinite Kisses II.