Ishmael Randall Weeks – Tiza
Ishmael Randall-Weeks
Tiza (Chalk)
30 May – 19 July 2025
Private View: 29 May, 6–9pm
Gallery Nosco, Brussels
Gallery Nosco is delighted to present Tiza (Chalk), a solo exhibition by Ishmael Randall-Weeks (Peru 1976) with a new body of work conceived specifically for the gallery and continues his investigation into material memory, transformation, and spatial poetics.
Tiza—means “chalk” and originating from Nahuatl, the ancient language of the Aztecs, serves as both a literal and metaphorical anchor for the show. Chalk, a medium both fragile and foundational, is examined as a tool for thought, expression, and erasure. From blackboard to construction line, it symbolizes impermanence, knowledge, and latent potential. Randall-Weeks treats earth as instrument, material as language, and space as a mutable surface where meaning is built and dismantled. Through sculptural installations and reliefs composed of reclaimed concrete, plaster, wood, and industrial debris, he meditates on cycles of construction and collapse, and the traces we leave behind.
At its core, the exhibition reflects on the architecture of ideas—how structures are conceived, inhabited, and ultimately undone. The gallery becomes a site of conceptual excavation, where memory is embedded in material, and matter becomes metaphor. Rooted in the artist’s transnational experience between Peru, Mexico, and the United States, Tizainvites reflection on the ephemeral, where silence takes form and presence emerges through absence.
The Chalkboard Screen series draws from modernist design and mid-20th-century revolutionary magazine aesthetics, blending the visual language of Le Corbusier’s chalkboards, sacred retablos, and political iconography into a metaphorical toolbox—where history, spirituality, and ideology are layered, erased, and reimagined as evolving conceptual blueprints.,,,,
Biombo series reinterprets the Japanese wind screen as a mutable architectural object—infused with references to ventifacts, meteorological variations, and systems of measurement—ultimately folding these intangible forces into a distilled embodiment of the notion of the nothing, where absence becomes form and the invisible gains presence through structure. Echoing the spatial sensitivity of Melotti and the material transformations of Scarpa, the works shift between architecture and sculpture, evolving into playful, contemplative objects that inhabit and reshape space with quiet intensity.
Meditaciones series delves into concealment and inaccessibility, embedding books, mineral rocks, and meteor fragments within stratified architectural forms. Evoking archaeology and geological time, these works encapsulate knowledge beneath layers of sediment, where education becomes a buried relic—shaped by erosion, memory, and the slow compression of history into material silence.
Código Atemporal series, emerges from daily walks through the city, capturing fleeting impressions of the urban environment and its rhythms. Blending observational studies with abstract codes, the works translate everyday encounters into layered visual notations—timeless traces of place, movement, and the evolving dialogue between body, architecture, and terrain.
About the Artist:
Ishmael Randall-Weeks (b. 1976, Cuzco, Peru) lives and works between Lima and NY. His work has been shown internationally at institutions including MOMA PS1, NY, Museo de Arte de Lima, the Bronx Museum, NY, the Drawing Center, NY, El Museo Barrio, NY, the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern of Art, UK, the Design Museum, London … and is held in numerous public and private collections. His interdisciplinary practice spans sculpture, video, drawing, and site-specific interventions.