Ann Weber: Love and Other Audacities
May 22 – September 11, 2011

Opening reception
Saturday, May 21 | 6 – 9 pm
$10 | FREE for CAFAM members
Please RSVP: rsvp@cafam.org

Come enjoy CAFAM’s two new exhibitions and an evening of music, food and cool folk! Featuring Rani D. (Soul in the Park) and delicious Mediterranean fare provided by Gourmet Genie food truck. Gourmet Genie is generously donating a percentage of their evenings sales to CAFAM.

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San Francisco-based artist Ann Weber’s elegant, sculptural works grace the CAFAM’s third floor gallery in Love and Other Audacities. These massive sculptural works echo the silhouettes of pods, gourds and other biomorphic forms. Despite the sculptures’ oversized, undulating contours, what will surprise most people is the humble material she uses—cardboard.

Armed with a stapler, a box cutter and shellac, Weber constructs towering artworks out of cardboard that she often fishes out of dumpsters. When asked about the physical stature of her work, Weber says, “I'm interested in how big you can make something before it collapses.”

In Love and Other Audacities, Weber’s anthropomorphic sculptures mimic the complex and continually evolving relationships between individuals. “I’ve always thought a lot about relationships. How vital they are to our living and breathing, how they almost work sometimes and sometimes they don’t,” remarks Weber. “I feel like sculptures are metaphors telling stories about our lives.”

Trained in ceramics, Weber supported herself by making “functional pottery” in New York City for more than 15 years. Moving west in 1985, she found inspiration in the works of Peter Voulkos, Richard Shaw and Viola Frey, who were all making art out of clay. With Frey as her mentor, she took on the zeitgeist of women’s liberation percolating in the air. But it wasn’t until 1991, when she moved into a large new studio, that inspiration came to her.

Surrounded by flattened moving boxes, Weber took a cue from architecture icon Frank Gehry’s cardboard furniture and decided to experiment with the raw material sitting in her living room. Merging her ceramics background with an ongoing examination of architectural structures enabled Weber to build beautiful, gravity-defying works that often eschew symmetry.

Since then, Weber has done residencies in San Francisco, Saratoga and Germany. She won the 2004 Public Art Award given by Americans for the Arts and the 1998 California Arts Council Individual Fellowship in Visual Arts. Her cardboard works have been translated to bronze and fiberglass and have been commissioned for public art displays around the country.

About Ann Weber
Ann Weber is a San Francisco Bay Area sculptor, active in the public art field, who has won award commissions for sculpture at the State Capitol building in Sacramento, a public library for the city of Phoenix, and two bronze sculptures for Skyline Park in Denver, Colorado. She has been featured on Spark!, a television program on KQED about Bay Area artists and has received a California Arts Council Fellowship Grant. In 2010 she was awarded two artist-in-residencies: one at the de Young Museum of San Francisco and another at the internationally acclaimed Lucas Artists Residency Program at Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, California. She created seven large outdoor sculptures for Sculpture on the Grounds with the help of community volunteers.

Recent solo exhibitions include an inaugural exhibition at the Chehalem Cultural Center, Newberg, Oregon; Boise Art Museum in Idaho and the Triton Museum in Santa Clara. Also: Stremmel Gallery in Reno; Afterlife at the Institute for Contemporary Art in San Jose; Alchemy at the William Havu Gallery, Denver, Colorado; and This End Up: Cardboard Sculpture, San Jose Museum of Art. She is represented by Donna Seager Gallery in San Rafael and William Havu Gallery in Denver. For more information visit www.annwebersculpture.com.