ERIKA WEITZ: ART AS ALCHEMY

Erika Weitz: I’ve been painting for as long as I can remember. It’s the one thing I’ve done consistently for my whole life. I took a darkroom photography class in high school, but traveling is really what locked it in for me. I started solo traveling internationally at age 17, and I fell in love with traveling and photography simultaneously. The two fit together in such a way that the lens became my way of understanding not only the world but myself.

EW: Painting is more of a solo endeavor—more internal, involving long hours in conversation with myself. Whereas with photography, whether documentary or conceptual, it is fairly external, as I’m usually working with other people. I tend towards the figure and portraiture because I'm interested in human emotions and the psyche. I’ve been working in sculpture a lot lately as well, which soothes a different part of my brain—a longing to be in the vastness of nature. To me, these mediums are all different channels of expression but stem from the same source.

EW: There's no formula. I like to act as a channel and call things in, but I also like to loosen my grip on controlling the process. Sometimes the concept hits me, and then I figure out the execution. Other times, it's in the act of creating that the concept reveals itself, almost like an archeologist digging in hopes to discover something. The key to that process is discipline; you have to be willing to get your hands dirty.

EW: On a personal level, traveling has shaped me into who I am. Exposure to as much of the world as possible has helped me form a worldview that is both specific and universal. I hope the work I create both acknowledges, respects, and honors the complexity and beauty of that experience. I stand in gratitude to all who have shared their energy and culture with me, and I remain dedicated to creating with an integrity that reveres that cross-pollination. We have a lot to learn from each other, and I'm happy to be a student of that knowledge.

EW: I love LA. LA is such a strange place, but it has this energy about it that has kept me here. Living in downtown LA, I used to step outside my building and see how many languages I could hear being spoken within earshot. It could easily be up to 5 or 6. Most of the world is represented in this city, and culture and community are two things that are very important to me. Also outside the freeways, LA has the ocean, the desert, forests, and mountains all nearby. My next series is a sort of love letter to the chaos of LA. The city is so multi-dimensional, and it has explored over a decade of my experience here.

EW: I do prefer physically working with my hands to staring at a screen, but there are some serious advantages to working in a realm outside of the physical. There’s a very strong purist attitude in a lot of mediums. I work with wet plate collodion from the 1850s. AI seems to be at odds with some of that mentality. I try to approach it with non-judgment. My sole purpose is to express myself as clearly and truthfully as possible. Sometimes that’s in the form of burning wood with a blowtorch; sometimes that’s with AI. The path to get there is less important to me than my determination to be on the journey.

EW: It’s ever-evolving. Working with one of the first-ever photographic processes from the 1850s and with AI, I constantly see parallels between the two. Throughout my life, photography has gone through so many evolutions that I never saw it as one thing; it has always been fluid. Working with wet plates and AI has opened some really interesting conversations about reality. Conceptually, for me, it is a tool that helps me blur the lines of time and space.

EW: I’m constantly in shadowban. This work exists—maybe not uncensored on the major platforms, but it exists. The work has a life outside the algorithm, but you might have to come to a show to see it in its true form. I feel very strongly about freedom of expression and women's bodies, human or AI, not being subject to puritanical censorship.

EW: Alchemy is literally the precursor to chemistry, which is what made photography possible in the first place. 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.

EW: Any ritual practice can have deep and profound effects if approached with that intention. Especially one where you have such a direct line of communication with an entity advancing as fast as AI. Religions have been started for less.

EW: When I moved to LA, digital photography became more commercial for me. It went from being transformational to transactional. I was also spending more time editing than shooting. Wet plate collodion didn’t make any sense to start because I couldn’t afford the equipment and there was almost no information available. But the slow pace and the ritual romance of the process made me fall completely in love. Light-activated silver on black metal—that called to me. I couldn’t have predicted it, but here I am, almost 10 years later, still loving the mystery of what the chemicals can do. The addition of AI in the darkroom has opened an entirely new path for me in wet plate.

EW: I’m very interested in the deep past and far future. I see time as cyclical and on a forward-moving coil. I aim to challenge and expand the way we experience our inner and outer worlds. The AI and Alchemy work is capturing the descendants of data from a historical process, making those borders of time and space more porous.