Shelli Weiler

False Spring employs intuition as a resource for creating a subjective world through the act of doing, playing, and being girl. Informed by the history of gendered performance in magic theater and film, this work articulates means of ritual escapism through feminized youth practices and diversion. Using both candid and staged imagery, the series aims to conjure depictions of unattainable desire via costume and veneer.

The pastimes pictured revolve around recreational activity, from occult witchcraft gatherings to animal-themed cafés. By exploring the production of fantasy alongside spiritual forms of retreat, bodies are reconstituted as sites unto which both dreams and nightmares can be projected and desired. The photographs turn towards the body as tabula rasa in its investigation of persona via artifice and theatricality. Although such qualities have been traditionally reviled as inherent to femininity, this series instead acknowledges inauthenticity as a site of agency and resistance. Each portrait serves to communicate how imaginative refuge, and the magic it ostensibly endows, may be sought and found through the uptake of alternative identity and constructed narrative.

Shelli Weiler is an artist from New York with a BA in Studio Art from Wesleyan University, where she studied photography among other digital arts practices. Her work primarily revolves around the production of fantasy and its failure, using portraiture to document performance in a non-documentarian way. She is currently based in Brooklyn, New York, working as a digital productions intern at Griffin Editions.