What's on Los Angeles | Index


by Jody Zellen

October 10, 2024


Julie Weist
Private Eye
Moskowitz Bayse
September 14 - October 19, 2024


Julie Weist

In 1969, Vito Acconci created Following Piece where he followed random strangers as they traversed New York City. He concluded this surveillance when the person entered a building. Photographs, maps and notes make up this multi-panel conceptual artwork. In 1980, Sophie Calle created The Detective, a photographic piece where she hired a detective to follow her. In another work, Suite Vénitienne (1983), she was the follower rather than the followed. Suite Vénitienne chronicled the surveillance of Henri B. as he wandered the streets of Venice and as a book, as well as an installation, it was made up of both texts, maps and photographs documenting the process of trailing and spying on someone.

Julie Weist's Private Eye follows in this tradition. This conceptual artwork documents Weist's stint as a private detective in New York beginning in 2022. The exhibition includes photographs and documents (a version of her actual state license to be a private investigator (PI)), as well as documentation of her (mostly online) investigations. Weist decided to be a PI as part of a public art project and went through a laborious application process and was approved, much to her surprise. The PI license gives one access to searchable databases that contain information on private citizens. Weist's investigations centered on cars and she searched the database for various types of license plates. While she purportedly followed the rules surrounding searches as a PI, her pursuits were somewhat out of the ordinary. 

An example is the display of a framed facsimile of her PI license located near the entry of the exhibition. The title of the work — All persons to whom such license certificates have been issued shall be responsible for the safekeeping of the same, and shall not lend, enable, let or allow any other person to have, hold, use or display such certificate; and any person so parting with such a license certificate or displaying the same without authority shall be guilty of a misdemeanor — calls into question the legality of exhibiting — and perhaps even selling — this document as a work of art.

In OUTATIME from the DRNsights Database (2024), Weist creates digital collages that juxtapose surveillance photographs that hone in on car license plates with satellite images of the cars supposed locations. "OUTATIME" is a reference to the film Back to the Future and many fans have souvenir plates with this phrase. Weist searched for this in the database and displays the photographs that showcased positive results. The framed archival pigment print juxtaposes printed snapshots taken by surveillance cameras that Weist found in the database with aerial views of neighborhoods from locations all over the U.S. Each car picture is centered in a view of the neighborhood be it an urban or suburban setting. More than thirteen pairings are collaged together within this large print. Weist was quite specific when searching the database. In addition to OUTATIME, she also looked at license plates that read  honk, found and artwork. The associated photographs are also printed out with mapped locations and incorporated into digital collages.

In some ways, Weist's pieces, especially those in her Vehicle Sightings Series can be seen as performances. When Weist discovered that tow trucks eager to repossess cars hunt for them like live prey, she staged quasi-performances by parking her car near repo yards hoping that webcams would photograph her car and feed it into the database. To make it more "fun" she'd "dress up" her Subaru covering with flowers and in one instance a tutu. In Watching the Watcher she entered the plates of the repo tow trucks she saw going after cars slated to be repossessed and in turn presented these often out of focus and cropped photographs in grids of nine pictures representing the repossession in action.

Weist also includes three beautiful and abstract handmade paper pieces. These works are compiled from shredded documents. One mandate of being a PI is to shred evidence. People with Traffic Citations in My Town: Guilty & Dismissed (Wildcard Search for Self) (2024), contains fragments from random traffic citations, again culled from the PI database, that meld with raw and colorful paper fibers. That Weist implicates or surveils herself in a number of the works comes as no surprise. In Self Portrait from the Vehicle Sightings Series and Self Portrait as Investigator and Investigated (both 2023), she collages images depicting the license plate of her green Subaru with "Non-Public Data Access Forms" and other hand written records to comment on issues of privacy and vulnerability. 

In this intriguing and complex body of work, Weist investigates archives using data — images and texts — as raw materials for creative explorations. Artists have a long tradition of mining archives (Lyle Ashton Harris, Leslie Hewitt, Fiona Tan, Adam Pendleton and Theaster Gates to mention just a few) but Weist's pursuit is a bit different in that she actually became a Private Investigator to gain access to information not available to the general public. In doing so, she opens a "can of worms" about surveillance, ethics and vulnerability stating, "I think that the vulnerability really comes from not knowing that these systems are operating." 

The work in Private Eye exposes what goes on behind the scenes and can be interpreted as a warning sign — like the panopticon that Michel Foucault writes about so elegantly in Discipline & Punish —  that everyone is being watched. Big data is the new omnipresent eye.