Mother Island: Act I
Rebecca Weisman

GALLERY III

Rebecca Weisman, Mother Island, detail of installation, 2025, sailcloth, projection, mirror, wood, motor.

January 10 - February 8, 2026

Opening reception: Saturday, January 10 from 6-8pm

A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce Mother Island: Act I, an immersive installation of moving images and sculptures by Rebecca Weisman. This is Weisman's first solo exhibition in New York City. The first of a trilogy, Mother Island: Act I interrogates motherhood as both creative effort and survival strategy. Weisman interpolates her experiences of childcare and artmaking during the COVID-19 lockdown through a blend of real and fictional accounts of shipwreck and stranding. Weisman’s repurposed sculptural materials and projected video performances encompass the formal and aesthetic qualities of motherhood and early childhood, a dynamic defined by experiences such as the disturbance of linear time, dissolution of a personal subjective gaze, and gonzo-style decision making.

In Mother Island: Act I the viewer moves through various sculptural elements that act as both set and reliquary. The eponymous video addresses two narratives of stranding: a fantastical pandemic lockdown shared by the artist and her children, and archival footage of a reenacted shipwreck from the 1960’s. Structures from the video come to life in the gallery space, and each setpiece presents an opportunity for discovery, constructed from years of drawings and sculptures co-created by the artist and her children. A version of the children’s Island House, constructed of reclaimed materials and collaged drawings, invites viewers to enter and watch videos installed inside, while the children’s makeshift boat reveals another video embedded in its floor. Form and function betray each other, dissolving into irrational symbolic iconography and contingencies of material choice. Everyday shapes such as pallets and cones become geographic and architectural elements. Projections are layered on top of large plaster “mountains” based on children’s sculptures, while mirrored objects spin in the air like mobiles, catching the projection and refracting light.

Each aspect of the installation draws the viewer into the filmic narrative, blurring the boundary between object and moving image, dream and reality. Inspired by and utilizing everyday and domestic materials, Mother Island creates a lexicon of primary objects and actions. Weisman and her youthful collaborators transmogrify these objects and actions into ritualized totems, delineating a visual language of our earliest primitive relationships and memories and inviting us to reflect on our most fleeting and vulnerable moments.

Rebecca Weisman is currently a National Member at A.I.R. Gallery. Recent exhibitions and screenings include phantom charges, A.I.R. National Members Show; So It Goes at Wassaic Projects; Atelier 11, Paris; Sunview Luncheonette, NY; Cine Salon Film Festival; Toronto Women's Film Festival; and a solo exhibition at Burlington City Arts. She was recently an artist-in-residence at L'AiR Arts, Paris, and the Vermont Studio Center and has published articles on art and philosophy and taught courses in video art, installation, and conceptual art. Weisman holds a B.A. from Reed College and an M.F.A. from Goddard and currently lives and works in Vermont, USA.

View Rebecca Weisman’s artist page here.

View the Press Release here.