Laina Michelle Weiss is an interdisciplinary artist working between painting, sculpture, and performance. She was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, received a BFA in Illustration from Parsons The New School for Design in 2016 and is currently working towards an MFA, also at Parsons. Her work has been shown in The Parsons Festival (2013) and The Beachwood Art Show (2016)

Through my work, I investigate purity. My interests are in the physical sense as well as the ideological. I understand hygiene as a metaphor for rituals of atonement, and both as the maintenance of a ‘self’; identity being constructed through boundaries. I am interested in the slippage of boundaries and breaching through porousness and fluidity. I make fountains relating to cleaning as well as excrement, and produce ceramic works, referencing the sterile materiality bathrooms, as well as goopy paintings referencing the bodily. My practice also includes performance, in which I enact upon myself rituals of purification, highlighting their inherent violence. My work is gruesome, yet playful, and employes kitsch as a contaminant, irreverently defusing abjection.