In her artistic practice, Elaine Cameron-Weir questions the individual and collective conditions that shape our perceptions of the world. Her work is informed by belief systems from science and religion to industrial and military paradigms and the ways in which they influence how people seek and experience meaning. Cameron-Weir often incorporates objects and materials originally intended for practical use in these fields, recontextualizing the histories and connotations they have acquired.

A new site-specific work commissioned by the SCAD Museum of Art, Dressing for Windows (Exploded View) or ‘everywhere I go people know the part I’m playing’ is a contemplation of the ways symbolic weight and false equivalencies come into play in the models we use to interpret and intuit our lived experience. Emphasizing the altar-like architecture of the SCAD MOA Jewel Boxes, which are publicly visible yet physically inaccessible, the artist embraces the dual proposition of these spaces as both façade and display case. Engaging with each space using a repeatable staging system, the installation poses questions about truth and entanglement while implicating the onlooker as a fundamental aspect in this tableau.

Each brick arch is installed with Cameron-Weir’s signature pulley and counterweight configuration, allowing the artist to establish relationships between different objects through the schematics of measurement. The work presents itself as an instruction manual — a technical tool, rather than didactic or purely interpretive. Like a three-dimensional exploded view diagram, a mode of visual communication that details how parts relate but does not ascribe meaning, it clearly indexes each object in dialogue with the whole yet refuses a simplified narrative.