Yann Weiner is committed to the idea of material integrity in his artwork, using non-traditional materials to explore themes of memory and decline. Having a strong interest in dynamic and abstracted forms, he often looking towards digital and distressed imagery as a starting point to describe frayed recollections of places and the people who inhabited them. Yann has a strong appreciation for the post industrial towns of the North East, as they warmly look back towards days of manufacturing and productivity while confronting their current state of blight. He is fascinated with the palette of these towns: crumbled plaster, rusted girders, chipped paint, oxidized metals, congealed oil, concrete and brick. Yann seeks to accurately reproduce the elements of these enthralling landscapes through the use of paints mixed with various substrates, tar, washes of ochres, and various metals, which oxidize to different states.

Yann also has a keen interest in glitching, how a computer may accidentally rupture an image, translating it into a bizarre, geometrically disrupted version of itself. The breaking of an image, through errors in its recollection, can create create a familiar yet distorted picture which feels akin to recalling hazy memories. The shape of the memory is present, but the details begin to deviate. He uses various editing programs to play around with the code an image, replacing values until it begin to glitch and striate.

For his subject matter, Yann focuses on content which fills people with a sense of belonging and pride, particularly work and personal relationships. The buildings he choses to work on were once vast economic powerhouses, now awaiting some sort of second life after years of sitting abandoned. The source images for the blurred out smiling faces are derived from old photos purchased from estate sales and on eBay. These then scanned and worked on digitally before starting the physical piece. Both subjects are ghostly yet present, existing in a space between the nostaglic past and a undesirous present.

Yann lives and keeps his studio in Providence, Rhode Island. He currently works at Converse in Boston as a surface designer, creating patterns and graphics for the brand's footwear and apparel collections. Yann received his BFA in Illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design. Please contact him at yannweiner@gmail.com with any questions.