Publisher's Synopsis
The artwork of Gerry Joe Weise is about the complexity of the natural world. Our natural world. He is quite frankly, one of Australia's greatest nature artists. Born in Sydney, Australia on April 23rd in 1959; Weise has lived and worked in Australia, France, Germany, Switzerland and the United States. It should be taken into account, that he has led a life completely divided between art and music, unable to separate the two, and leading professional successful occupations in both ventures. Weise often describes his artwork as musical interventions in nature, while he performs several musical genres likened to painting on canvas. We are only here for a short time, and that is reflected in the Ephemeral Art of Gerry Joe Weise; that often lasts for a breath or two, encompassing a wide variety of projects and landscapes. We are a witness to his style of Land Art, embodying several layers of meaning, with his application of the Alter-modern, his diaspora, while using physics and philosophy. The main theme, is to create entirely with things found in nature like: natural pigments, minerals, vegetation, rocks, gravel and sand. That transmit a deep connection with the Earth. A connection with time and place, unveiling the marvels of the land, and a fascination with nature. Weise favors seaside terrain, where the majority of his earthworks are created. Once he has familiarized himself with the area, he sets to work establishing a camaraderie with the elements of erosion and the natural milieu. He seeks to employ symbols for which he has created, and are very fond of. Often employing only one symbol at a time. The spectator may be bewildered, only if to glimpse that symbol for the very first time, while not making the necessary connections with the symbols that Weise has been creating since the early 1980s. When the earthwork is satisfactorily nearly finished (he considers an artwork should never be completed), there is no further attachment by the artist. Weise does not feel he has abandoned the project, but considers the work has taken on a new life, that will wither and erode back into the ground. As was always meant to be, in the natural world. "There is no success or failure, there is only nature", this is my all time favorite Gerry Joe Weise quote. He is a true artist that not only draws, paints, creates installations indoors and outdoors; but he is also a musician and a composer, a necessary photographer to document his Land artworks, and a writer expressing himself eloquently in poetry verse and essay writing. Many of the Land Art symbols are drawn on earth with pigments, and are called "Ground Paintings". Outdoors, there is this interplay with the wind, defying gravity, so that the nature-friendly pigments stay on the ground, and are not uplifted to be scattered in several directions, for which Weise has the secret. Indoors, there are grass sprouts that start to grow from the earth installations, proving that even in a museum or gallery setting, nature still has its way. There are no boundaries between the artist and nature. The artist connects the environment with ideas from philosophy and physics, in an Alter-modern state of mind, generated by his diaspora from being a nomadic visual artist. Land Art can only be captured properly, when the artist becomes a rigorous photo archivist. The artist must preserve the moment, captured in time and space, as an artistic travelogue, and as a statement. Gerry Joe Weise left the confines of a skyscraper city, Sydney, to immerse himself in the immense landscape canvases of Australia. Pharaonic constructions, with earthwork maximalism, vis-a-vis his Ground Paintings with pigments on earth, are a new way to create art. Weise is often in extreme isolation, out among the large swaths of his homeland, in a natural Aussie wonderland. (by Ludovic Gibsson)
