Photographic Alphabet: W is for Shelli Weiler
Horn Girl (2019, inkjet print)
A woman encased behind glass models silicone horns for consumers interested in the prospect of LED implants.
ENJOY house
ENJOY house presents forms of escapist amusement as hostile and uninhabitable environments. Subjects and spaces are produced in the pursuit of ideals, where sites for entertainment are fashioned by their shortcomings. Through the negation of color, this series focuses on how the construction of fantasy inevitably entails its own failure.
An absence emerges from the cumulation of disparate places and their visitors, all of whom become actors participating in the same theater. This theater consists of costumed spaces that take on the appearance of purgatories rather than playgrounds. By photographing moments of authenticity at the height of artifice, I look at the ways people manufacture themselves to conform to the props that surround and confine them. The discovery in each picture lies in the decontextualization of activity, where nonperformances take center stage and expectations of glamour evacuate in the physicalization of desire. The formal simplicity of greyscale attests to this symbolic power, emphasizing a generation’s inheritance of a modern empty experience.
Kissing Booth Girls (2019, inkjet print)
At Fa La Land, a made-for-Instagram Christmas-themed pop-up in Los Angeles, twin girls press their bodies against a kissing booth backdrop. They appear as two-dimensional shadow puppets fighting to become three-dimensional beings.
Doggy Slide (2019, inkjet print)
Human’s Best Friend, a space dedicated to bolstering the popularity of dog Instagram pages, contained a steep slide that was later removed after too many puppy injuries.
Lifted (2019, inkjet print)
A boy is transcended to and decapitated by Pizza Heaven at the Museum of Pizza in Williamsburg.
Glass Room (2019, inkjet print)
In BeautyCon Pop, a seemingly-glamorous selfie space resembles a hall of mirrors. It appears as an archaeological site that folds in on itself, reflecting nothing except for its own vacancy.
Clouds (2019, inkjet print)
Blue drapery and cotton create the pretense of a limitless sky.
Marilyn Mural (2019, inkjet print)
At the Museum of Selfies in Los Angeles, a visitor ponders a Marilyn Monroe mural.
Glitter Bomb (2019, inkjet print)
An employee at the Winky Lux Experience samples a perfume called Glitter Bomb. It appears as a ghostly toxin suffusing the space, leaving remnants of glitter in my eyes and throat.
Wonder World Dress (2019, inkjet print)
A woman conforms herself to a mannequin at Wonder World Space.
Shelli Weiler is an artist from New York with a BA in Studio Art from Wesleyan University, where studied photography among other digital arts practices. Her work primarily revolves around the production of fantasy and its failure, using portraiture to document performance in a non- documentarian way. She is currently based in Brooklyn, New York.
You can see more of Shelli’s works here.
