Weston Teruya

artist statement:

My artistic practice takes the form of drawings and sculptures that examine the history of the built environment and its social institutions. Moving between historical research and creative reinterpretation, I take elements from site studies and archival record and manipulate them to alternately reveal or re-imagine the often hidden histories, forces and investments that have shaped the current landscape.

In building the work, I draw on both significant and mundane images and objects from a site and its surrounding landscape and reconfigure their arrangements and relationships to one another. This exploration includes objects at the peripheries of spaces—elements that signal access and control; bounding markers like barriers, fences and wall segments or other objects like flags and guardian statuary which imply social borders. In more recent work I have populated these rebuilt worlds with historical markers, references to archival display and the architecture of social gathering and presentation, like gazebos or circles of chairs. I cull from both the mundane and specific, bringing together things that bear reexamination in new and strange contexts. While these speculative pieces are built from objects drawn from real sites and carry with them the traces of their original social purpose, their new configurations allow for other possibilities, including agency or critique.