After graduating from Xavier University in 2007 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in photography and painting, Erica Weitz’s practice merges her two mediums of predilection in a perfect alchemy giving life to portraiture both mystical and romantic.
Since 2022, she has been incorporating AI in her projects, infusing her classical techniques and sometimes “old school” methods with the technical prowess of the machine, blurring the lines between time and space, old and new.
Her subjects and her artistic medium of choice are often juxtaposed. A dichotomy between the new futuristic setting her subject is represented in and her artistic medium of choice, wet plate collodion for photographs’ development, one of the earliest photographic processes, dating back to the 1850s. A juxtaposition further emphasised by the use of AI.
The wet plate collodion process, a craft that emerged during the American civil war, improved the quality of photographic images developed at the time. A favoured choice for soldiers wishing to leave memories of themselves to their loved ones. Erika Weitz, learning about the process in 2012, chose to include it in her practice, making the most of the way the plate photography infuse the pictures with textures and a stronger play with values.
For her latest series “CYMATIC: Patterns of Pentatonic” created in collaboration with Thomas Noya and fxhash, alchemy meets algorithms in a dialogue that translates the digital into analogue.
“My darkroom is a chemistry lab. In a more esoteric view, the alchemical transmutation of matter mirrors the transformation of one’s inner spiritual world. My practice is rooted in both.”
