In Karin Weiner’s new exhibition, her humorous vocabulary of survival and discovery spawns a combination of large scale sculpture and works on paper. In the latter, her signature collage elements are now attended to by impositions of paint and ink. Weiner shifts between animal and human narratives, as parallels unfold wherein the natural world mimics our daily antics and vice versa. Humans grow roots and houses sprout rainbows, while animals smoke cigarettes. In her universe of hordes and hoarding, the world seems to be inundated with itself but is never devoid of visual surprise and pleasure.

The artist, recently removed from the urban bustle of New York City to the quiet of a rural Vermont studio, created the works while holed up against the forces of weather and informed by the constant radio static of dramatic world events far removed. In one installation, a tottering island is littered by ridiculous dwellings clinging for dear life to precarious crystal cliffs. Created from the accumulations of imagery and actual material of past bodies of artwork, the sculpture’s massive presence, drenched in an oily sheen, is uplifted by a halo of spouting rainbows. It has a range of implications from the artistic growth process to a universal desire for joy and rescue from a hazardous, morally ambiguous world.

In the main gallery, a full-size lifeboat lays run aground. Cobbled together from found wood and designed as a home for a single survivor, the piece has personal as well as political ramifications. In the artist’s own words:

When I was a kid, we would spend the summers with my father in Maine. We lived on his boat and were left alone at a very young age to mind ourselves while Dad went to work. It sounds criminal today, but to us it proved our father’s trust. In addition, we developed this incredible sense of freedom and adventure. We had a small dingy that we would row out into the middle of the bay day or night. In complete darkness, we would be amazed with the stars and the phosphorescence in the water that sent up an eerie glow when stirred by the oars. We would float around for hours, oblivious to danger and fear which should have been very real, before attempting to navigate our way back to harbor by way of the few lights on the houses. Therefore, boats have always been symbolic vessels for me. They embody something mysterious and wonderful from my childhood and even that incongruous sense of security remains appealing…

This ship is the artist’s escape pod in an upended world and represents the notion that in the end, one is left with oneself. The vessel is also about her own personal salvation as much as her hopes for the future.

Karin Weiner has exhibited widely with recent solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Portland as well as group shows in Boston, New York, and Vienna. This summer, she will be artist in residence at Belmont Mill in County Offaly, Ireland. This is her third solo show at ZieherSmith.