Transformations and Other Everyday Events
Solo exhibition, Whitney Payson Gallery, Portland, ME, 1997
…Weslien created an installation based on her studio experiments with other multiplicities—those of space, light, and object transformation—by using eight slide projectors. Installation art—the practice of creating immersive environments in art spaces—was still relatively new. Sobol was taking a risk in letting Weslien use the second-floor as she did, and the opportunity was indeed transformative for Weslien. In Maine Art Now, art critic Edgar Allen Beem describes his encounter with the installation this way: The dramatic hi-tech space of the Payson Gallery has been transformed into a visionary white room, the centerpiece of which is a small symbolic house of wood and scrim, which fills in the gallery overlook. In the house area, a bird cage, a table set for tea, a chair and a bench; all white, distorted, and off -balance in a surreal suggestion of vertigo. Three corners of the room contain small auxiliary houses and the walls between are lined with an odd assortment of objects—sleds, tricycles, rakes, shovels, brooms, windows, branches, and mysterious cardboard cut-out figures, all painted white.
From “Standing Between Cultures” by Allison Ferris, featured essay in the exhibition catalog KATARINA WESLIEN: What Did You Smell When You Were Away? published by Speedwell Contemporary in 2021.
