Touches of the Disappearing Things features recent work by Cindy Stillwell and BarbaraWeissberger. Stillwell’s films and Weissberger’s photographs explore a sense of accelerated time and disappearing things. Stillwell’s films, shot on 16mm film negative, in color and in black and white, have been hand-processed using plant-based developers grown in her garden or foraged near her home. The films in the exhibition explore common garden flowers from a plant’s eye view, in extreme close-up, often closer than the human eye can see without aid. Weissberger’s photographs present everyday objects, organic and manufactured, in weird and humorous configurations, whose time scales parallel and diverge from our own. Weissberger refers to her series of photographs of things at hand in the studio and home, as absurdist jokes, precarious stacks, and meditations on the life of objects without us. Stillwell describes her current film work as driven by a need to observe these plants in a poetic form, slowing down to bear deep witness as they move through their life cycles alongside our own. These themes are equally teased out in Stillwell’s cyanotype prints and Weissberger’s photographic quilts. Fragility runs through the work of both artists—the fragility of living things with their intricate beauty and of human made objects in delicate balance. And with this fragility comes questions about collapse and sustainability, a constant tension.

Cindy Stillwell and Barbara Weissberger met in the 1990’s at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts when Cindy was a graduate student in film and Barbara was an administrator and faculty in the Department of Photography and Imaging. Stillwell is a film artist based in Bozeman, MT, a Professor of Film at Montana State University’s School of Film and Photography and serves as the Program Director of the MFA in Science and Natural History Filmmaking program.

Weissberger is an artist based in Pittsburgh, PA, a Teaching Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who has been coming to the Montana Artists Refuge every summer since 2000. Both artists exhibit and screen their work nationally. Several years ago, Barbara and Cindy reconnected and have been hiking together and talking about art ever since.

Barbara Weissberger Bio

Barbara Weissberger’s work has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship,
numerous artist residencies in the US and abroad including the Drawing Center Open Sessions, Yaddo, MacDowell, Camargo, Bogliasco, Ucross, the Ragdale Foundation, the Hambidge Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Montana Artists Refuge. Her work has been exhibited at such venues as The Drawing Center, PS1/MoMA, White Columns, Project Artspace, NYC; Catskill Artspace, Livingston Manor; Hallwalls, Buffalo; Gridspace, Brooklyn; Silver Eye, The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; ADA Gallery, Richmond; and The Missoula Art Museum, Missoula. Her work has been written about in journals including Femme Art Review and The Heavy Collective. She is part of the collaborative duo ALDRICH + WEISSBERGER. She received an M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute. She was born in New Jersey, lived in San Francisco and New York before moving to Pittsburgh. She divides her time between Pittsburgh, New York, and Montana.

Cindy Stillwell Bio

Cindy Stillwell is a film artist based in Montana. Her film and art practice focus on
working with analog filmmaking including hand processing super 8 and 16mm, working with mixed media to create handmade animations, and working with various techniques to create 2d paintings, drawings and photo-based work on paper. Through these process-heavy works she consistently explores existential ideas on human beings living alongside other species, time-beings with whom we share this magnificent planet.

Her films have screened at numerous venues including Sundance Film Festival,
International Film Festival of Rotterdam, Edinburgh Film Festival, Full Frame Film
Festival, and as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s Documentary Fortnight. Stillwell is also a professor of film production at Montana State University where she teaches undergraduates and mentors MFA candidates in the Science and Natural History filmmaking program.