ABOUT
Sally Weber is a light artist based in Oakland, California, who works with optical and digital holography, video, dimensional photography, and light installations.
Weber grew up in the Northeast, earning her Master of Science in Visual Studies from the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She trained with Otto Piene, Director of the Center and a founder of Group Zero, and Harriet Casdin-Silver, a pioneer artist in the development and artistic uses of optical holography. Her work focuses on revealing the immediacy of the essential natural forces underlying life and the patterns that interconnect them. She has produced numerous public art installations and private commissions, and has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally including the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, OH, The McNay Museum, San Antonio, TX, the Museo of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal, the Kunsthalle, Budapest, Hungary, and the Osthaus Museum, Hagen, Germany.
Weber is a founding member of the collaborative, Resonance Studio.
FROM THE ARTIST: MY WORK WITH LIGHT
I work with light. I sense light as immersive itself, a substance we move through unconsciously all the time, an unseen presence between us.
I was drawn to optical holography using a laser as no other media allowed me to touch and shape light so directly. Holography was a means to manipulate light itself: redirect it specifically; or focus it into dimensional imagery.
Engaged with light, my awareness grew that photons, as energetic particles, are the first movers in the natural world. The collision of photons breaks the bonds between the chemical and particle components of nature. Always on the move, light is the energy that fuels change. Light is a paradox. Photons, the actual particles of light, travel at the speed of light and are always in the present. Like infinity, the perpetual now evades our understanding of time and space and the full, interconnected complexity of nature. Both particle and wave, light defines and illuminates our world, powering the transformative processes of life.
Light touches us on the most basic levels—physically, mentally, and spiritually—and thus inspires and connects us. My work evolved from a deep attraction to the physicality of light and color in space. Touching light, touches time, space, and the transience of life itself.
Sally Weber [photographed by Donna Granada]
“The results were several pieces and events which showed . . . new magic for holography and its applications—a field that to my knowledge as been confined for too long to narrow interpretations of new picture-making. Given her initiative and sense of direction Sally Weber can indeed carry her spectral wonders into architectural dimensions.”
— Otto Piene, Director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT, letter, October 13, 1983
Weber’s work and commentary on the early days of holography are included in the book, Centerbook: The Center for Advanced Visual Studies and the Evolution of Art-Science-Technology at MIT by Ellen Sebring and Elizabeth Goldring, 2019, distributed by MIT Press.
“For Fractured, Sally Weber has taken dead leaves and plants dried out to shades of brown and gold, scanned them, and printed them to a large scale so that the minutest fibers and fluctuations in their surfaces are visible. The precision and detail of the images recall photography's roots as a science, a method of capturing what the human eye never could.
Here, the opportunity to look close is balanced with a sense of awe at the sculptural quality of the plants and leaves. They often float in the middle of the image, like asteroids…. The best example is Spared, a little curled-up leaf or seed casing hollowed out so that it looks like a lacy piece of gold jewelry with a stem. Rather than center it, like much of the other work, Weber chose to place the leaf toward the bottom of the image. The finished photograph looks a lot like a Rothko painting. The bottom half, where the leaf rests, is a darker gray with shades of black, and the top half is mostly white. Between the two halves is a dark bar like a chasm featuring computery streaks, a reminder of the digital origins of the piece that balances out the organic subject matter – the leaves and such that one might typically remove from the technological orbit….
I don't need another precious image of a leaf – what is more useful is a fresh way to perceive a leaf. This is what Weber offers. In any event, the photograph and nature are more or less one anyway. The essential medium of a photograph is light. What's more natural than that?
— Sam Anderson-Ramos (review, The Austin Chronicle, vol 36, no 25, February 17, 2017, p32)