Works by Rachel Mica Weiss made a striking impression at the Dallas Art Fair in April, where they were presented by the New York–based gallery CARVALHO. Known for her sculptural and immersive installations, Weiss explores tension, structure, and materiality in ways that challenge perception. In this conversation, Jennifer Carvalho—founder and director of CARVALHO—sits down with the artist to delve into her practice, process, and the ideas behind her latest pieces.
Jennifer Carvalho (JC): Your textile language speaks to both the landscape and the psyche. How do you draw connections between interior states and external environments? What drives this impulse?
Rachel Mica Weiss (RMC): My practice is rooted in psychology, and I’ve long been interested in how emotional states can be translated into material form. I’m drawn to dualities—strength and fragility, power and vulnerability—and how those tensions can be held within a single object or spatial experience—or human being. Textiles, with their softness and history as spatial dividers, offer a compelling medium to examine psychological and physical boundaries. I’m interested in the structures we build—architectural, psychological, emotional—and how they might be rendered permeable, flexible, even undone. I’ve always worked large-scale and found the loom too restrictive. Expanding off the loom allowed me to engage sculpture, installation, and architecture—disciplines that share concerns with the body, space, and perception.
JC: These pursuits are lucidly connected across your various series, whether domestically or architecturally scaled. In your Woven Screens what begins as a linear element builds into a dimensional threshold. In what ways do you conceptualize this sense of passage and the viewer’s role?
RMW: The idea of the portal is central to my work. The woven planes are entry points into ways of perceiving. When approached head-on, the threads dissolve into a color field; viewed obliquely, the underlying geometry emerges. That shift in perception is integral. I want viewers to sense how fluid and contingent our seeing can be. All this is held between the frame, drawing on its historical use as a mediator between reality and image, creating two worlds—one the viewer occupies, and one imagined and seen through the “screen.” Recent work goes beyond this reference of painting space to piercing the solidity of the picture plane. While previous Woven Screens were atmospheric landscapes viewers felt they could enter, recent works use brighter, harder-edged blocks or bands of color that seem vibration, weight, or compression—ways to tap into viewers’ psychic or phenomenological experiences.
JC: The classical arch is so deeply encoded in our built environments that we almost stop seeing it. In Arches you soften, even unmake, this symbol of strength. What possibilities emerge when we take apart a structure we assume to be permanent?
RMW: The Arches installations, like Draped Arches in Gold in Brookfield’s Allen Center in Houston, remake a traditional form in material that’s soft, almost slouching. What’s solid and immutable is made permeable—vulnerable, even. It challenges the authority of the built world and suggests that even our most established structures—physical, psychological, cultural—can be reconfigured. By unmaking the arch, I’m not removing its power, but opening up space to invite more fluid and human-scale interpretations of strength.
JC: Your Topographies installations respond so intuitively to architecture yet evoke the shifting rhythms of the natural world. How do you negotiate that tension between what is shaped by nature and what is shaped by hand?
RMW: Topographies bring the outside landscape in, casting seemingly fixed landforms as diaphanous and permeable. That act is a metaphor, suggesting that barriers may be less solid than we assume. These spaces hold contradiction: stillness and movement, containment and expansiveness, vulnerability and strength. In many ways, Topographies visualize the porous boundaries between our bodies, our environments, and the systems—natural and human-made—that shape us.
JC: Your outdoor installation, Yield, on view at the Al Held Foundation through October 10, brings these inquiries into direct conversation with the landscape. Did it reveal anything to you about the natural world’s own agency?
RMW: Yield marks my first foray into bringing my fiber work outdoors. I bound together 32,000 feet of rope using 66,000 zip ties to create a net that hovers just above the earth, following the slope sculpted by artist Al Held decades ago. The form evokes an earlier topography and gestures toward both control and surrender. I think of it as offering the land a kind of porous veil while allowing it to reassert itself. Grass began growing through the fiber almost immediately. That quiet reclaiming was something I hoped for but couldn’t fully anticipate. It speaks to the tension we hold with the land—our compulsion to shape it, and its enduring capacity to grow back through us.
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