Description
Artist Statement
The first photo I ever fell in love with was “Satiric Dancer” by Andres Kertesz. All these years later I decided to recreate it in miniature and in color. While working on the set, I became curious about the muse, the “dancer”. Who was she? What was her life like? Why did we know so much about the photographer, but nothing of his subject? After some research, I uncovered her name (Magda Forstner) and that she had been a cabaret performer with a successful career of her own. But other than that, she is lost to history.
Next, I restaged the scene once again, but into a contemporary setting. I removed the muse from the romanticized vision of the decorative object and portrayed her negotiating the unglamorous reality of daily life as a mother of two toddlers.
Continuing in this vein, I examine familiar muses and women from past stories and myths, and inhabit them in contemporary scenes. Of course, this is not a novel idea. Creating variations and reinterpretations of these tales is an age-old tradition, practiced throughout art history. In focusing on the women (often not acknowledged as anything other than an object) in these old stories, historic artworks and mythology, I strive to present the muse from her viewpoint, furthering the issues important to me as a contemporary female artist.
Bio
Grace Weston is a Portland, Oregon-based artist who creates narrative photography through meticulously crafted miniature staged vignettes. Her work explores psychological, political, and intersectional feminist themes with a distinctive conceptual and visual voice.
Among her recent honors, Weston was awarded First Place in All About Photo Magazine Issue #46, themed Women. She was also a category winner in the 2025 Julia Margaret Cameron Awards and was longlisted for the 2024 BBA Photography Prize in Berlin. Recognized as one of the Top 50 photographers in Photolucida’s Critical Mass 2023, she received the additional prize of a solo exhibition at the Southeast Center for Photography in Greenville, South Carolina.
Weston’s work has been exhibited and published internationally, including a solo exhibition curated by Ann Jastrab at the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, California, featured in All About Photo's Showroom, which garnered widespread recognition across professional photography publications in multiple languages. She received both First Place Overall Portfolio and Gold Winner honors in the Fine Art Portfolio category at the 2021 Tokyo International Foto Awards.
Throughout her career spanning more than 27 years, Weston has earned fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission and Artist Trust (Washington State), nominations for the Portland Art Museum’s Contemporary Northwest Art Awards, and numerous grants supporting her exploration of staged miniature tableaux. Her work was the feature of an extensive exhibition at the Center for Photography in Yekaterinburg, Russia, in 2021, and she held her first European solo exhibition at Paci Contemporary in Brescia, Italy, in 2012.
To learn more about Grace, please visit her website: graceweston.com
