jamie weinstein
Instagram: @listeningwithmyeyes
Bio: I am by nature someone who cares, and carries people. I feel deeply and think hard. As a doctor, mother, community advocate, I am called to love people’s deepest contradictions and accompany them through their most joyous and difficult transitions. Love may be the best medicine, but some days it gets pretty heavy. Making art has always been how I digest and process what I have taken on.
My practice began when my kids were little, finding time to build collages from the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life. I grew up surrounded by vintage quilts and always wanted to work with textiles, so over time as my life became a bit more spacious, I found my way to stitching layers of feelings and stories into fabric.
The first response to my work is often "it's cute.” Mismatched textiles, childlike techniques, and dollar-store ephemera invite you in, and I want that. But like the people we are and the work that I do, nothing is as straight forward as it seems. Sometimes good people do bad things, sometimes bad things happen to good people. Art can be crafty, embellished and utilitarian, abundant and purposeful, cute and creepy and compelling.
For me, creating is less about perfecting technique than entering into a relationship with salvaged and repurposed materials, sitting with the inevitability of unwanted things. The process quiets my mind and often starts one place and brings me somewhere unexpected. At home with my materials, I am less writer than listener, less maker than collaborator.
Statement: Three Chairs is an exploration of imagined childhoods: wild, free, feral, and decorated, where time stretches and wraps itself around itself and you wear a costume everyday so that the mundane becomes magical. A sort of childhood that might heal us, even if it never actually existed.
My creatures were born in 2024 out of a package of extra-large packing peanuts. Something in their simple cylinder form demanded my attention. I began wrapping them in fabric scraps, mixing colors and textures, stitching them together in ways that were haphazard yet purposeful. Insides were hidden; forms stayed on display. Patches were held with suture-like stitches and embellished with beads and baubles. In their abundance and variation, these shapes began to have spirit and energy.
One day I pulled out a dusty three-foot foam roller and started to patch and stitch it into a larger companion. I realized that it needed legs and I wanted them to be a child size chair. What followed was several months of immersion: quilting tubes and plastic chars, embellishing, patching, stitching. Repeat.
Three distinct companions emerged, each unabashedly herself. The first and largest, is dreamy and botanical. She feels silly and safe and when I hung her beads and placed the last flower I realized I had created an imaginary friend. The second, birthed from tacky 1980s floral cactus fabric, is the queen of the desert. Her birds appeared as if on cue at my reuse store and perch on wooden knitting needles - she is crafty and a little trashy and would stand up to a bully on the play ground. The third didn't entirely cooperate: her parts aren't connected, and she is very pink. She is like the barbie dream house I kind of wanted and would never buy for my own children. She belongs to this community even though she doesn't quite fit because that is how we roll.
Together they form a folkloric gathering with stories to share: wild, whimsical, unique, made in relationship with the materials that chose them. They are an imagined childhood I may have experienced and certainly wanted for my children: feral and decorated, communal and unfailingly individual. They don't do anything. They certainly became something that reminds me that imagined childhoods might heal real ones, and that wonder is not something we lose, it is something we create.
