Laila Cola Weeks
LAILA COLA WEEKS | BRANDENTON, FL
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2017
“Digital Memories in Hard Copy” – Exhibit 208, Albuquerque, NM
2016
Red Door Brewery, Albuquerque, NM
2015
Satellite Nob Hill, Albuquerque, NM
Toad Road, Albuquerque, NM
2014
Tractor Brewery, Albuquerque, NM
Farina Alto, Albuquerque, NM
“Black and White on Steel” – Zendo, Albuquerque, NM
2011
Farina, Albuquerque, NM
2010
Scalo, Albuquerque, NM
“Unfamilliar Faces” - Watson House, Albuquerque, NM
2006
Blue Dragon, Albuquerque, NM
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2018
“Drink Me” - Dab Art Co., Ventura, CA
“Salina Biennial: Contemporary Art from the Mountain
Plains Region” - Salina Art Center, Salina, KS
2017
"MAUVE" popup show in Albuquerque, NM
2016
Ongoing – Exhibit 208, Albuquerque, NM
“516 ARTS Studio Sale in the Gallery 2016” - 516 ARTS, Abq., NM
“DOORS for the ARTS: A Street Exhibit” – Albuquerque, NM
2015
“Enchanted Pop Up” – El Chante, Albuquerque, NM
“The People’s Art Show” – 5G, Albuquerque, NM
“The Bomb” – South Broadway Cultural Center, Albuquerque, NM
2014
“Floating in Place” – Kimo Gallery, Albuquerque, NM
“Pudding Head and Friends Present” – Albuquerque, NM
2011
“Critters” Sarah Smith Contemporary, Corrales, NM
“New Works in Black and White” - 5G, Albuquerque, NM,
“Les Artes Eclectic” Albuquerque, NM
“Geometrics for Breakfast” 105 Gallery, Albuquerque, NM
“Pudding Head Presents” Albuquerque, NM
“Back Yard Art” Albuquerque, NM
“The Face in Contemporary Art” 105 Gallery, Albuquerque, NM
“High and Dry” South Broadway Cultural Center, Albuquerque, NM
2010
“Small Offering” - Reser House, Albuquerque, NM
“Fresh” 105 Gallery, Albuquerque, NM
“Back Alley Corpses” - Albuquerque, NM
“Pudding Head Presents” - Albuquerque, NM
2008
Trillion Space, Albuquerque, NM
Stove, Albuquerque, NM
2007
Stove, Albuquerque, NM
House of Johanna Gustavsson, Albuquerque, NM
2006
House of Johanna Gustavsson, Albuquerque, NM
“Cairn” - John Sommers Gallery, Albuquerque, NM
John Sommers, Albuquerque, NM
2000
Trillion Space, Albuquerque, NM
LAILA COLA WEEKS
Laila Cola Weeks was born in 1986 in Berkeley, California to an American father and a German mother. Both parents being artistically inclined, she began drawing at a young age and painted her first oil painting at 11. In high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico, her art teacher and ever-after close friend, Justin Bagley, taught her how to build canvases and encouraged her creative process. She spent those years painting in acrylic, and won a couple of blue ribbons in an annual city-wide juried youth art exhibition. At the University of New Mexico, Weeks was reintroduced to oil paint, and promptly fell in love with the medium.
She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from UNM in 2008. In the past decade, Weeks has lived briefly in Queens, New York, as well as for a couple of years in Berlin, Germany, painting and drawing all along the way.
In 2013 she returned to Albuquerque, where she currently resides. "There is a beauty here in New Mexico, which is both legendary and subtle. It is a beauty which does not present itself immediately, but which instead takes time to be appreciated. Perhaps it is an acquired taste, one which I have learned to love." Her current series of oil paintings focuses on humanity in the digital age.
EDUCATION
2008 BFA University of New Mexico magna cum laude
REPRESENTATION
2018 - Present Dab Art Co., Los Angeles, CA
ANTONYMIA
Laila Weeks’s works are portraits of the faceless. Floating in a space with no horizon or context, the viewer is drawn to the subjects like planetary bodies. These figures interact with an intensity and quietude that makes the viewer feel as if they are witnessing something--a birth, a death, or something more.
Rooted deep in these images is the bond that ties antonyms together, showing the beautiful and familiar entangled with the ugly and alien; the cure fastened intractably to the disease. By combining them in ways that seem both instant and eternal, commensal and parasitic, these paintings compel the viewer to contemplate the duality and self-reflexivity of all existence, from the tiniest microbial dance in the primordial soup, to the most percussive collision of stars in a galaxy whose light has not yet touched us. In their anonymity and placement, they can be seen as macroscopic or microscopic, and above all introspective, displaying our own most confusing and powerful emotions.
A witness and an observer are not differentiated by who they are, or what they see; rather it is the connection between the two that creates the distinction. We merely observe life, but we witness the life-changing, be it a new child growing in the womb, or a home consumed by flames. From the innate dichotomies of these paintings, you may take with you solace that if the wonderful moments of your life were not constantly entangled with the terrible, if your hope was not shadowed by despair and your love unaffected by apathy, you would be denying that which is in front of and within you: the tangled, oscillating, and sublime nature of our world.
By confronting this antonymia, this inextricable relationship of opposing ideas, one can stand witness and testify to their own experience. One can begin to identify as a living thing, who belongs here, but will not forever. By pairing imagination and memory, these paintings evoke the conflict and care that is not only essential to, but indicative of what we all collectively witness every day.
-Written by Joe Hillman
