Gallery Two, Chicago
Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present A Lazy Love, our first solo show with Ella Weber. After a long day’s work, Weber would often treat herself to a free 90-minute massage at Nebraska Furniture Mart. During the pandemic lockdown, she used her government stipend to purchase a 2D Luxury Zero Gravity Massage Chair to use from home, the chair becoming a temporary substitute for human touch. In a series of surreally hyperreal graphite drawings and a video, Weber explores the relationship between labor and rest, love and loss. See more from the artist herself below. Please join us for the public reception on Friday, January 10, from 5 to 8pm at our Chicago location alongside Julia Schmitt Healy in Gallery One. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.
“Dad, what is the definition of lazy?”
“Me,” he said while reclining in his chair, the game on TV.
A Lazy Love explores the relationship between labor and rest, love and loss. In a consumer culture of constant production and work, inevitably comes the question, “What’s next?”
Honestly, I just want to sit. I want to rest.
After a long day’s work, I like to treat myself to a free 90-minute massage at Nebraska Furniture Mart, “America’s Largest Home Furnishings Store.” While vibrating in a massage chair for sale, I let the voices of couples shopping for La-Z-Boy recliners drift me back into the middle class. I call this Lazy Boy Poetry.
Oh my word this feels so nice. My back is in heaven.
Sit in it with me. I don’t want to lose you.
As the dialogue of couples searching for the perfect chair washes over me, I contemplate my own love life from afar. In my relaxed position, I begin to see each La-Z-Boy recliner as a literal lazy boy. Like the dating app of my past, chair after chair is for sale, screaming try me, feel me, buy me. Swipe left, swipe right. What’s next?
What am I looking for? What makes a good chair? The most compatible partner?
Do I have a type? Am I too comfortable? Is this the one?
Woven into the fabric of each La-Z-Boy recliner, I render the faces of past relationships. Through drawing, as a type of meditation and reflection, these delicate graphite drawings reveal an intimacy through time. Similar to how memory fades, the empty chair references the loss of what was, while simultaneously embodying a former lover. After 40 hours of labor, each drawing is “finished,” yet left incomplete to reflect upon a lazy love.
Love is sad, at least at the end.
During the pandemic lockdown, I used our government stipend to purchase my own massage chair to use from home. This 2D Luxury Zero Gravity Massage Chair became a temporary substitute for human touch. In the video, A Massage Chair Without a Body, the machine is programmed to vibrate, mechanically inhaling and exhaling unaware of its lack of a body to embrace. Koi fish swim in and out of the scene, revealing a feeling of longing for love and friendship, as the leather chair morphs into the skin of my grandmother’s chest searching for breath on her deathbed.
Through drawing, text and video, the viewer is invited to sit in the space between transactional and relational love, while ultimately asking where does one find rest?
As St. Augustine famously said, “Our hearts are restless, until they rest in you.”
Ella Weber is a basement-based artist who uses humor, performance, and storytelling within her mutli-faceted practice. Playfully upending the existential fabrics of daily life, Weber transforms her minimum-wage day jobs into her studio. Across the counter and screen, Weber blurs the line between employee and customer, performance and reality, art and life. Weber’s recent solo exhibitions include the Plains Art Museum in North Dakota, The Union for Contemporary Art in Nebraska, and Munson in Utica, NY. Group exhibitions include the Everson Museum in Syracuse, Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, ICNY in New York, among several others. Residencies include MASS MoCA, The NARS Foundation, Rogers Art Loft, PrattMWP, Ox-Bow School of Art, The Wassaic Project, and Anderson Ranch. Her debut novel The Deli Diaries was published with Latah Books in 2023. Weber received an MFA from the University of Kansas and she lives and works in Omaha, Nebraska.
Stay tuned, Weber will be presenting a performative artist lecture presented as a Stand–Up Comedy–Microsoft PowerPoint –TED Talk–poetry reading, inspired by her debut novel, The Deli Diaries, at the gallery at some point during the run of this show. More info is forthcoming.