Elaine Cameron-Weir: Medusa
3008 Monticello Blvd., Cleveland Heights. | former Medusa Corp. Headquarters | Lobby

Opening Reception: Friday, August 22, 5:30–8:30 pm
The installation on view:
Saturday, 8/23/2014, 11–5 pm
Sunday, 8/24/2014, 11–2 pm

Elaine Cameron-Weir uses materials that evoke a sense of timelessness, including stone and brass, to create sculptures at once organic and artificial, futuristic and faded. They appear to be poised, alien, ornamental, knowing.

This exhibition features a selection of Cameron-Weir’s new work, installed in the lobby of the Medusa Cement Company’s old headquarters in Cleveland. Since its founding in 1892 (then named Sandusky Portland Cement), the company’s trademark was the head of Medusa, described in their advertising as “that famous woman of mythology whose hair was writhing serpents and whose glance turned every living thing to stone.” In 1957, the company moved into a new, modernist building designed by Cleveland-based architect Ernst Payer, who studied under Walter Gropius. The building has been occupied intermittently since 1998, when the company relocated to Houston after a merger. Retaining its original features, the Medusa lobby provides a distinctive and resonant environment for Cameron-Weir’s work.

Medusa is the mythological embodiment of a distinction that pervades experience: that of animate versus inanimate. This boundary feels disquieting and intoxicating, permeating bodies and shapes, structures and molecules. The marble, soapstone, and alabaster in Cameron-Weir’s sculptures appear like fragments of bone or remnants of a glacial migration, and retain the cavities where explosives are lodged during quarry. These channels host telescoping brass beams, stretching upwards with leaves of the Monstera deliciosa. Though still, they evoke movement and growth, though placed, they seem invasive.

The installation is presented courtesy of the artist and Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels. The exhibition is organized by Rose Bouthillier for Bellwether, a project of the Cleveland Museum of Art with support from the Contemporary Art Society. 

What is the potential for art to foster change in our social and urban environment? Bellwether is an open-ended series of discussions and events that aim to both explore this question and attempt to answer it. Each episode looks different and takes place in a different part of the city, but shares the common goal of discovering the possibilities and limitations of art as a transformative tool in Cleveland’s post-industrial context.