Joyce Weiss is often quoted as saying "Color is my life - I use it at full volume." This play on words alerts us to the artist's delight of synaesthesia; for color can be measured audibly as well as visually. Weiss says she has always "seen sounds", and her paintings are just as likely to be inspired by a piece of music or a snippet of conversation, as by a shoreline vista or a vase of flowers. Vibrations can be aural or visual, and Weiss makes the optical nerve vibrate by choosing radically opposing colors that figuratively "sing."

Weiss cites Robert Rauschenberg as an influence, and it's not difficult to see how this master of the remix has inspired her. Everything in Weiss's life becomes fair game to be cut up and pasted into artworks that reference life as it is lived, not sanitized into some kind of pristine utopia. Life is messy, and so Weiss's canvases are full of scraps of paper, scrawls, and drips, peppered with words, whether photocopied, stenciled, or hand-drawn. In a recent series, Weiss references the Tower of Babel, and cheekily pastes in medical texts to provide the "babble" quotient. Art and words do not exist in sanctified separation; they overlap, just as words and images do in life.

Weiss's most dystopian paintings, full of spary-paint and the feel of urban tagging, are called Fly Me to the Moon, and sport torn-up images of old style airplanes like the Tigermoth, moths, moons, and flight paths; Weiss's statement about seeing color leads me to reflect on the colors that different creatures see. For example, bees see yellow as magenta, and flower petals, to them, are covered in a complex array of information like airport runways. Weiss's Mellow Yellow is a still life which metamorphoses tiny, delicate flowers into gigantic geological formations. Weiss allows the viewer to imagine themselves to be bee-sized as they contemplate these larger-than-life blooms.

This slippage between macro and micro views of the world is echoed in Weiss's choice of modular mediums for her paintings. While they cover the entire wall, each painting can be broken down into smaller components, which work just as well separately as they do when part of a whole.

Ever since Cezanne, artists have been reminding viewers of the two dimensional nature of the canvas, eschewing illusionistic space in favor of repetition, pattern, and other techniques to emphasize the painting's surface. Weiss has an enduring love for Op Art and many of her paintings sport the undulating dashes, dots and waves of the art from this era. She uses strips of fabric in her paintings, as historical remnants and memory triggers, as well as simply textural information. As with fabric, which gets cut and sewn, so, too, do Weiss's modular paintings get separated and rearranged.

Such ideas of dispersal, recurrence, and the fragment being part of a greater whole permeate Weiss's work. Adding self-referential layers - fabrics, photos from her journeys, photocopies from personal notebooks, even text from her plays - Weiss makes a cultural melange which she mixes intuitively. Reflecting her environment, which is currently the bright sun and crisp winds of San Pedro, Weiss's bold palette and rhythmic approach make for a delightful series of abstractions which you can hear as well as see.

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