Seneca Weintraut - Through the Veil of the Door

In Seneca Weintraut's second solo exhibition with COMMONWEAL he continues his investigations into the contemporary American psyche through the lens of popular culture with a focus on the resurgence of the “folk horror” genre, which uses elements of folklore to invoke fear and foreboding.

Weintraut's paintings, collages and sculptures question the romanticism of alternative value systems of cultural propriety attributed to idiosyncratic communities unmoored from contemporary American norms.

Rural environments, abandoned architectures, and the apathy of nature to the human condition are themes Weintraut employs as catalysts in “Through the Veil of the Door". While his artworks acknowledge a distrust of established structures of social cohesion, they also seek to expose the deficits—be they economic, political, or social—that returning to an ungovernable Arcadia might accrue.

Seneca Weintraut [b. 1988] is a Philadelphia-based artist. He attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in the summer of 2013, and received his MFA in painting from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, in 2015. His works have been exhibited in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Over his professional life Weintraut has counted money on a riverboat casino, cut grass in an oil refinery and built mausoleums in several prominent cemeteries.

Photo of Seneca Weintraut courtesy of Aaron Richter.

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