LUNGS - Michael Vallera + Mike Weis (photobook)
LUNGS
by Michael Vallera + Mike Weis
The Garrote, 2022
In their first collaborative effort, photographers Michael Vallera and Mike Weis offer a vocabulary of images absent of linear narrative or explicit place. What emerges is a collection of experiential and discrete moments that direct attention to a nearly invisible underlying order, culled from solitary explorations on foot throughout 2020 and 2021.
Each diptych becomes a quiet record of the contemporary state of our world at the level of the individual. Vallera’s images (left) and Weis’ images (right) form intimate visual synchronicities, at times unified and at times discordant, but always in a balanced dialogue informed by scale, form and negative space. Lungs is offered as a poetic document, pairs of meditations from the impermanent and slight corners of daily life.
First edition of 100
Printed translucent vellum jackets
56 pages (Lynx Opaque Ultra 100lb)
50 color images
Perfect bound
9x12 inches
Mike Weis, born in 1971 in Gary, Indiana, is an American artist/environmental activist currently living in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He is a photographer, a percussionist, a sound artist and a landscape ecologist. Since 2000, Weis’ creative emphasis has been in the field of experimental music and sound. As a founding member and drummer for the internationally recognized avant-rock band Zelienople, Weis has continuously pushed outward and challenged boundaries between the avant-garde and pop within Zelienople and his various side-projects. Weis studied West African ritual rhythms with Ghanaian master drummer, Gideon Foli Alorwoyie and traditional Korean Pungmul drumming with the Korean-American group Ilkwanori and master musician So Ra Kim from Korea. Recently, he has turned to the solo format releasing music under his own name with conceptual-based audio/visual projects that blur the lines between religious ritual practice, ecological study and art.
During the late-90’s and 00’s Weis focused his photographic work on the subject of domesticity and the issue of private/public property. Recently, he has turned his attention to ecological concerns: deep perception of the natural world and mindful attention to sentient and non-sentient interspecies connection. Weis’ ongoing project is a thorough examination of the juxtaposition of nature and industry in the Calumet Region of northeastern Illinois and northwestern Indiana through photography, sound and botanical and ecological research and activism. This work will be published as a catalog photography book and album by Monastral in 2022. Weis is also a professional native plant landscaper, a member of the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology and a volunteer restoration steward for the South West Michigan Land Conservancy.
Michael Vallera is a musician and visual artist based in Chicago, Illinois. He received his MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the spring of 2010 with a concentration in Sound, where the majority of his tenure was spent researching and implementing studio techniques related to long-form composition and drone music. During this time, he formed the duo Cleared with percussionist Steven Hess (Touch Recordings) and began a rigorous solo practice of recording and releasing albums under his own name. Primarily centered around the electric guitar, his work in sound explores the creation and investigation of intimate sonic space through formalist structures of repetition, patterning, and movement. He has performed internationally and has released his own music via the Berlin imprint Denovali since 2017.
His visual work largely focuses on the use of photography and collage to investigate similar themes of mood and space through precise use of symmetry and natural light. The subjects of landscape and the human trace are prevalent throughout his body of work, which includes two monographs of photography published by Harmonipan Editions and American Dreams Records. His visual work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, New York City, Mexico City, and Chicago.
