Elaine Cameron-Weir: viscera has questions about itself at the New Museum

In her sculptures, Elaine Cameron-Weir (b. 1985, Red Deer, Alberta, Canada) engages diverse aesthetic styles, bringing together modern, industrial, and natural designs to call attention to both manifest and hidden phenomena.

Since her earliest works, Cameron-Weir has drawn inspiration from the figure of the aesthete in late nineteenth-century Europe as a paragon of refined sensitivity to beauty, heightened sensory engagement, transgressive sexual desire, and the pursuit of pleasure through artifice or illusion. Intrigued by how many artists of that period pursued correspondences between senses, Cameron-Weir often introduces particular scents to her installations in the form of naturally aromatic resins like frankincense, myrrh, or labdanum—all of which have been used in a range of spiritual, medicinal, and funerary practices that trace back to the earliest civilizations. Cameron-Weir’s most recent works also reflect her fascination with emerging methodologies within archaeology that question the discipline’s privileging of vision and aim to enrich speculations about the past through a multisensory approach.