Studio Visit: Derek Weiler

Derek Weiler in his studio, 2020. Photo: Grant Knapp.

[Image description: A photograph of Derek, a man with light skin and short hair, wearing a striped t-shirt. He is seen at the bottom of the image, with artwork hanging on the white wall behind him. There are six horizontally-oriented sheets of white paper with silhouettes of figures printed in black, blue, and yellow, hung in two rows.]

Originally from Constance, Germany, Derek Weiler moved to San Diego in 2017 after studying fine art at Hunter College and art history at New York University. His practice centers on the human form, which he explores through print, animation, and installation. Working most often with silhouetted figures, he employs a minimalist touch to craft images that range from quietly evocative to highly charged. Emily Knapp visited Weiler in his studio at the San Diego creative center, Space 4 Art.

Untitled (Scent), 2020, graphite pencil on paper, 22 x 30 in.

[Image description: Two outlines of a human form, the shape of each body part overlapping to give the impression of being hinged at the joints. In the foreground is a figure’s head and shoulders, while in the background is another figure’s torso. The paper is covered in hatch marks in a mix of black, gray, pink, and peach.]

Emily Knapp: When did you begin making art?

Derek Weiler: In high school, one of the first things I ever did over an extended period of time was build a model theater, with my own stage set and little figures, in which I wanted to stage my own adaptation of Dracula. I still have the screenplay. I actually applied to art school with that; they didn't know what to do with it. They didn't know if I wanted to study set design or if I wanted to be a writer, but I took it really seriously.

Still from Untitled (Backbend), 2020, stop-motion video, 1 min. 1 sec. loop.

[Image description: Segments of a red human silhouette are divided amongst vertical black bands on a white background. The overall effect is that of a figure tumbling.]

Knapp: That's interesting because I remember the first conversation we had about your work was about the little dramas I interpreted in these pieces, which felt like a snapshot of a narrative that I was peeking into.

Weiler: I find that I have always been interested in the creation of illusion. I’ve always been interested in knowing that something is an illusion, and still believing it. At the time I just loved Dracula because it’s this epistolary novel that pretends to be drawn from [the fictional character] Jonathan Harker’s diary, and letters and newspaper articles, but at the same time it’s about some kind of monster that you know doesn’t exist. So it gives you this feeling of being real, while at the same time you know it’s all just imagination. I think that’s why it had to be a stage and not a painting, because I wanted to capture my imagination in cardboard.

Derek Weiler’s studio, 2020. Photo: Grant Knapp.

[Image description: A room with a white-painted brick wall, against which is placed camera equipment, a drafting table, a ladder, and a shelving unit full of art supplies. An image with a human silhouette in red is projected on the center of the wall.]

Knapp: Authenticity of expression is a key theme in your work. How does the tension between illusion and authenticity manifest in the works that you’re making?

Weiler: I know it sounds really romantic or naive, but I do believe in capturing, at some level, the truth of how it feels to be human. And our thoughts are often really elusive, and we watch those elusive thoughts, right? So there’s the knowledge that a lot of what goes on in being human is having certain imaginations. I think when it comes to my work, capturing the truth of this imagination is the paradox. I want to give you this notion that there’s a theatre where all this is going on but at the same time make you feel aware that it’s a construction. So whatever image you look at— like what you described as a narrative image— when you’re standing in front of it, you’re going to be aware that it’s just shadow play, that these are just shapes that have been glued or printed over each other. So you always hear the creak of the pulley, so to speak. And I find that’s my truth— trying to present you with the materials and techniques I’m using. In order to be truthful to the viewer, these materials— plywood, paint, all these things— have to be part of the topic, part of the search, and part of what I’m representing. It’s kind of like a two-step process; the emotional truth is first in myself, but then I only have devices; I only have outlines, shadows, figures, life-size, small-size, scale. I have to show you what it is I’m using in order for you to know that getting at human truth requires a lot of constructions, and that part of the reality we live is through constructions. 

Derek at his installation, The Man Who Sold His Shadow, for INTERCHANGE, 2019.

[Image description: Derek walks in front of a building bearing an art installation. He wears all black and a straw sunhat, and holds a hammer in his hand. On the left side of the building, the wall is painted red and a plywood figure with painted black details is affixed to it. Black text is painted on the right side of the wall. It says, “This is the story of a man who sold his shadow to a little man in grey.”']

Knapp: We’ve talked a lot about the mechanical elements of your work, like those commissioned for the INTERCHANGE public art project in North Park and some of the studio works we’re looking at together now, such as this inverted plywood figure or the animation looping behind us. Can you expand on the role of mechanization in your work?

Weiler: This inverted plywood figure was basically conceived as printing blocks to make these prints. But the printing block itself should have its own physical reality and its own innate quality. Hanging it upside down, creating these joints, showing you where I use color to print— it relates it to the print and shows you something about the process. Hanging it at the corner both separates and relates this also around the hinge of the space. They kind of hinge together. I’ve been thinking a lot about hinges as things that are somehow connected although they’re separate, and how these separate but connected objects can move and change their shape. That relationship can change. I’m really fascinated by that. I’m also interested in the weight of the figure, how it falls. If I move one of the limbs it’s going to hang differently. It has its own life. That being said, I like making this device and making it elaborate. I feel like you can't look at it without somehow relating to it on your own physical level, but it's not something that I can control.  

Work in progress, Derek Weiler’s studio, 2020.

[Image description: An inverted cut-out of a simplified human form with no head. Each body part— in blue, red, and bare wood— is hinged at the joint. The figure is placed against a brown working surface with a piece of white paper taped to it.]

Knapp: I definitely have an instantaneous reaction to the embodied nature of this piece because— even though it’s so clearly plywood, paint, screws, and string— I can’t help but react to it as though it were a person in peril. Just one tiny string holding this whole body here, and all of this energy and gravity pulling it down, this inherent danger. I can't help but respond to the humanness of this work. 

Weiler: When I started this project I was working with language a lot as a way of researching how images are made, how they are constructed in space. I got kind of tired of using language and I wanted to do something about the body. It just felt like it was a wide open field. It didn’t feel like there was figurative work that was in any way being discussed on a research level. When I came to San Diego I was also really interested in Expressionism. It seemed very strange to me that we would approach a picture and that we would think, “Oh, if I make gestures, or if I show a scream or wide-open eyes that we’re going to actually have some kind of expression.” What I did instead was just focus on the materials and the techniques that I use and let the expression take care of itself. And one of the things that I think is wonderful is when you put the paint down, the materials down, is how that transforms into some kind of expression. But it’s not something that I’m intending— it’s open for the viewer. I think there’s a lot of space here.

Untitled (Four Hands), 2018, Denril print on paper, 22 x 30 in.

[Image description: The black silhouettes of two pairs of arms printed on a cream-colored background. A pair extends from each side of the paper, meeting in the middle where they hold a red string between them.]

Knapp: I think a lot of my ability to project into these works has to do with the gestures, which to me seem to speak a secret language, sending me messages. The way hands are held or movement is implied, that has always been a key entry point for me into these works.

Weiler: There are really two things that I’m interested in here in response to that. On the one hand, my partner Marcos Duran is a dancer and I wouldn't be doing this without him. I think being with him gave me the permission that I could actually approach the figure and approach something like expression, because I come from a very theoretical background where that’s questioned. So the fact that it is possible to be expressive on stage was something that, again, I like to explore more as an open-ended question. What does the gesture mean? I’m not sure. But it brings up something else that is really interesting to me.

Untitled (Conversation), 2018, Denril print on paper, 22 x 30 in.

[Image descriptions: The black silhouettes of two human torsos on a cream-colored background. The figure on the left turns toward the figure on the right as they both gesticulate with their hands.]

When I was much younger and still in Germany, I was reading Interview magazine and there was a short article about surfer kids from San Clemente, the Fletcher brothers. In the article, their mother said something like, “They are our loving sons but they are also products.” That has kind of stuck in my mind through all these decades. There’s something about our bodies that’s a sign. And maybe that’s because the way we interact with our bodies is through our brains, but also through culture and technology. I like this gray area where a body, which we may conceive of as organic, turns into something that is also a sign. And how we sometimes perceive of ourselves as signs. As an analogy to that Interview article, for me, the body is always the body. But it's always also a sign. So I want these works to look like they’re imprints of a body, and at the same time I’m aware that I’m just replicating or reacting to signs.  

Untitled (Swing), 2021, charcoal pencil on paper, 22 x 30 in.

[Image description: An abstraction of white lines and planes of gray and black. The lines forms shapes that enigmatically suggest the back and elbows of a human body.]

Knapp: Some of the most recent works in progress I see here are stepping away from printmaking and deploying graphite to again explore the illusory nature of the figure. How do they relate to and evolve from your past works? 

Weiler: I see all of the works in this room as contemporaries of each other, although I do them in succession. I've been really interested in photography as it relates to painting or drawing. I don't know what the scholarship is right now, but it seems to me that historical analysis could not be complete without looking at daguerreotypes and photography. In George Seurat’s drawings, for example, which are supposedly about optical perception, those great, grayish tonalities seem often to not reflect what the eye sees but how the camera processes the optical image. It’s almost like he’s transposing the oxidized silver nitrate from photographic plate into the materials of drawing. I’m interested in this and other artists’ foregrounding of photography, not just working from the photographic image but using the materiality of the photograph as something that could become part of another work of art. It’s just another step in exploring what kind of device are we using, and how can I foreground the physicality of that device. So these started with layering paper cutouts, and then photographing the layers and superimposing the photographs in photoshop and then printing them on an inkjet printer. So I’m no longer working from the figure, no longer transposing the direct model, but I’m actually transposing the carbon flakes from that photographic digital process into a drawing process.  

And just on a personal level— maybe because of COVID, or because I feel like I wanted to spend more time on a single work, or because of the classes I've been teaching at Southwestern College and watching students take a long time with a drawing— I’m enjoying the slowness of putting graphite onto paper in these webs of tonalities. Seeing the slowness of the process and how that relates to a photographic or digital creation of an image of a human being. And seeing what on an emotional level comes out of that relationship. Because again, I'm just transposing. Once it's there, how is it going to feel? I don't know. But I know something will transform. It will no longer be just an image of myself.

Derek Weiler in his studio, 2020.

[Image description: Derek— wearing a white t-shirt— faces away from the camera, toward a wall covered in works on paper. He focuses on a gray and white drawing taped to a brown working surface.]

Knapp: I’m also attentive to the fact that these works are really focused in on segments, or cross sections of a body as opposed to a more representative whole. Why is that?

Weiler: I think it’s intentional that I’m taking out the face. I feel like I’m still having problems with the face. I don’t want them to be the humanistic depictions that we’re used to. I haven’t really found the right way to do them. So that’s removed on purpose. I think the cropping is a way of making something objective and establishing the frame of observance. I find where the legs join the torso is really powerful. A lot of power comes together there, and I learned from Marcos that this is actually the center of the body. The torso, the legs, the genitals— a lot of things happen there. It’s very complex.  

Work in progress, Derek Weiler’s studio, 2020.

[Image description: A bare wood cut-out of the upper body of a human form. It is smudged with gray and each body part is hinged at the joint. The figure is hung on a brown working surface with a piece of white paper taped to it, all on a white wall surrounded by photographs and drawings.]

Knapp: It's interesting to think about that center of power. The moment you said it my body immediately responded with tightened muscles and a straightened spine. It holds a lot of tension and physical power. It's the center of our sexuality, our relationship to other bodies, other people. Do you relate this work at all to your own sexuality or queer identity?

Weiler: I've always related to gay art and queer artists. The first art book I bought was by David Hockney. I felt like he showed me images that I wanted to see. For me the notion of identity, specifically at this point, is different now than in the 90s when a lot of queer art was about the AIDS crisis. This is still an important part of my work, but I also feel like I’ve kind of moved on. I also think that I’ve moved beyond queer visibility. So again, it's kind of like my approach to figurative art. What does it feel like to be a queer body, and how can I convey that? You asked about how my queer identity relates to my work and the only thing I can say is, for me it is an attitude of constant questioning. An open question, something you have to define again? I don't know. There's definitely a cultural element that I think is interesting, and it comes back to that quote by the mother of the Fletcher brothers: “They are our loving sons but they are also products.”  And that's how I feel as a queer person. I feel like we love each other, but it's really hard to get out of this notion that we're always being culturally constructed. So everything is constructed and yet emotionally authentic. Those are the two truths we have to hold onto.

Emily Knapp is an Industry Strategist for the University of California San Diego Design Lab and co-founder of the San Diego residency program, After 1920.

This conversation was edited by HereIn and the artist for length and clarity.