Heidi Weiss is a painter based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Her work explores the instability of memory through mediated images—film stills and paused television frames that become starting points for layered, disrupted, and reinterpreted scenes. Weiss holds a BFA and MA in Painting from Western Michigan University and an MFA in Fiber from Cranbrook Academy of Art. She teaches Painting in the Gwen Frostic School of Art at Western Michigan University and maintains an active studio practice in Kalamazoo.
Artist Statement
My work begins with mediated images—film stills and paused television frames that capture a moment mid-event. These scenes hold a charged instant that will shift as soon as it moves forward again. Freezing the frame interrupts that movement and creates a point of focus: a held moment that is both factual and unstable. The capture is technical, interpretive, and conceptual at once.
Painting from these suspended moments opens a space where memory and image begin to entangle. Details blur or reorganize; the scene takes on a logic shaped by distortion, recollection, and the residue of the original moment. I’m interested in how these images carry tension when removed from their narrative sequence—how stopping them alters their meaning and exposes their vulnerabilities. This pause creates a kind of psychical distance: a buffer that allows me to interpret without reenacting, to translate without replicating.
Layering is central to my process. Surfaces accumulate through interruption, adjustment, and the slow build of fragments. Some elements remain visible; others dissolve into shifts of color, glare, or abstraction. The painting develops through this negotiation between what is held and what slips away. This process mirrors the way memory itself falters and reforms—through gaps, contradictions, and moments that refuse resolution.
Across the work, mediated imagery becomes a way to translate charged scenes without fixing them in certainty. The distance created by the screen allows space for revision, instability, and reimagining. Each painting sits in that pause—caught between what the image captured, what it suggests, and what can no longer be known.