Livia Weiner was born in 2002 in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. She received her A.B. from Brown University with an honors thesis in Visual Art and Environmental Studies in May 2024. Her first solo exhibition, Stone Fruit, debuted at the List Art Center in Providence, RI, in the spring of 2024. Weiner has exhibited in many prestigious exhibitions, including the Providence Art Club College Exhibition (2024), the 43rd Annual Brown Arts Institute Juried Student Exhibition (2023), and All Street Gallery (2024). Her work has also been featured in the College Hill Independent and the Round Literary Magazine over a dozen times in the last two years. In 2023, Weiner received the Wendy Edwards Fellowship Award in Painting and was chosen as a Yale University Conservation Scholar. Weiner currently lives and works in New York City. 

Artist Statement 

As a painter and environmental activist, themes of womanhood, nature, and digital imagery are at the forefront of my work. I’m particularly interested in the ways that humans ideologically separate society from nature, as well as ecofeminism, a branch of feminism that considers environmental degradation to be a feminist issue. These themes inform my work, explicitly and implicitly, in both the images I create and the way I choose to paint.

Found imagery and objects are crucial to my process. Over the years, I’ve saved thousands of images into a folder on my computer, accumulating a massive archive. My sources are widespread: from screenshotted Daily Mail articles to grainy film photos from my childhood to telephone poles rendered unrecognizable from layers and layers of decomposing flyers. I collect these images from the depths of the internet and my camera roll, gravitating primarily to the weird, uncanny, and grotesque. More often than not, these photos contain bodies human and dog and rabbit and tree— embracing and rejecting one another. These images are what I turn to when I’m ready to start an oil painting. I combine a few photos from my archive into a digital collage; I play with perspective, saturation, transparency, and layering, messily pasting and painting on my computer.

I then photorealistically replicate each composition onto a large, human-sized canvas, exploring how a digital collection of images translates into a physical, textured object. By blowing up the tiny figures on my computer screen to unsettling, larger-than-life projections, I further delve into the world of the grotesque. I am particularly interested in how paint and its materiality contrast with a photograph’s more innately exact, precise nature; I lean into every drip, smudge, and accident. Through this process, I create pieces that give viewers the sense of looking through the fog of memory. By combining digital photo editing with textured painting, I create layered works that connect seemingly unrelated subjects.