Seneca Weintraut - Through the Veil of the Door

Why would we choose to be entertained through fear? Over the past several years American culture has been inundated by books and films that seek to give us the chills and we just can’t seem to get enough of it.

Questions like these are what Seneca Weintraut's artistic practice gravitates towards. He is fascinated by how the cultural zeitgeist can reveal hidden conjectures about our wants and needs, seemingly counter-intuitive to our projected desires. 

Formerly employed counting money on a riverboat casino, cutting grass in an oil refinery and building mausoleums at several prominent cemeteries, Weintraut received his MFA in painting from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, in 2015.

A Hoosier by birth and Philadelphian by conviction, in "Through the Veil Behind the Door" (his second solo-exhibition with COMMONWEAL) Weintraut continues his investigations into the contemporary American psyche by examining this resurgence of interest in horror as entertainment.

His paintings, sculptures and installations focus particularly on the “folk horror” genre, which uses elements of folklore to invoke fear and foreboding, to question an oft-touted trope of the genre: a romanticism of alternative value systems of cultural propriety attributed to idiosyncratic communities disconnected from contemporary social norms.

Rural environments, abandoned architectures, and the apathy of nature to the human condition are themes Weintraut counterposes with a sense of childlike abandon. While his artworks acknowledge a distrust of established structures of social cohesion, they also expose the deficits that returning to an ungovernable Arcadia might entail.