Corvallis resident Robin Weis is many things: a multimedia conceptual artist, an Oregon State University Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) student, an informal art show host, curator, collector and transformer of found objects, and an advocate for the visibility and inclusion of all local artists in traditionally exclusive spaces.
Through his myriad roles, art installations, and collaborations throughout the Corvallis community, Weis intends to continue making connections and expanding access for other aspiring artists, and help them cultivate a sense of belonging in their city.
Display Work
As an outreach coordinator at the Valley Library, Weis helps curate the Reading Room collection, a six-months rotating art exhibit inspired by community-prompted themes. Art and feedback can be submitted by current and former OSU students, faculty and staff, as well as anyone in the Corvallis community unaffiliated with the university.
“People will say, ‘Oh, I really want to see more books about XYZ in the collection,’ and we try to create avenues for people to communicate that to us; sometimes it’s a Google form, or comment boxes or whiteboards,” said Weis.
Through his outreach and curatorial work with both the Reading Room collection and rotating art exhibits at the Corvallis Book Bin, of which he is a former employee, Weis has been advocating for the installation of more community art spaces that are open and welcoming to all artists.
“All of the art in the library has always been this strange, untouchable, museum-like art by artists who aren’t or weren’t even community members,” he said. “It makes sense for people to be able to see themselves represented where they live, and I think there’s a lot of pride that can come with that, especially given the history of display work,” said Weis.
In November of last year, Weis worked closely with the Corvallis Daytime Drop-In Center to curate the “Camp Sweeps” Book Bin window display, which exclusively featured artwork by unhoused people depicting their experiences and struggles with being continually displaced by city sweeps. Later this spring, Weis and the CDDC will collaborate again to curate another, larger window display at the bookstore that will spotlight more pieces by unhoused artists.
“I think the goal would be to make this more of an exhibition where their artwork can be appreciated for what it is rather than as a statement on the sweeps — it can be about sweeps, but it can also be more about their personal journeys,” said Weis. “With the Drop-In Center, [there’s an understanding that] these are community artists; their art belongs in the community. But I don’t think a lot of the proper institutions to format their work are really kind to people who have those different backgrounds.”
Discarded Items, Discarded Selves
In the absence of formal galleries and venues, Weis has experimented with transforming seemingly mundane spaces into playful grounds for making, viewing, and interacting with art.
Last May, in an empty apartment once shared with his ex-fiance — a space they would have shared as a married couple — Weis hosted Liminal Atrophy, a by-appointment, interactive pop-up show that was a blend of conventional display gallery and interactive art installation. Before the lease ended, the apartment was opened to viewers as “a grimey, defeated home” that was once resided in by the artist, where traces of his past life lingered in carefully curated found items, artwork he created over the course of his stay to process various traumas and losses, and installations consisting of other remnants of the formerly inhabited space.
“Centered around loss, isolation, and unfulfilled promise, this installation featured every piece of discarded trash that was left in the dingy apartment once my partner had decided to leave,” wrote Weis on his website. “I curated piles of debris in conceptual sculptural form and invited guests to sit with me in the trash where we shared stories of loss and hurt.”
Guests left the show with free copies of a zine Weis created, titled Rare Bird: Self-Birthing, composed of his illustrations, childhood photos, and poems about coming to terms with queerness.
Discarded items became a central feature of another interactive art installation Weis held in October at Mt. Caz, a now-closed Corvallis-based DIY artist residency, titled Benign Inc. The installation was created using possessions that belonged to Weis and to his late mother and uncle, the latter of which he began collecting in the years following their deaths. The name for the event stood for “Benign Incorporeal Beings” — a term which he used to describe the ghostlike, unfulfilled selves that are shed upon taking alternate paths or entering new phases of life, as embodied by these possessions.
“In 2016 I came out as FTM transgender and shed the malignant self that I had been cloaked in for years — I began socially and physically transitioning and in the process of doing so, I shed items that tied me to who I was before,” wrote Weis in an artist statement for the event. “Much of the femininity and affinity for a domestic life that was assumed to be my future are contained alongside the items that belonged to my mother. My ex-fiance’s work shirt, my binder from gender-affirming top surgery, and postcards from artists I sought to model myself after linger in the space as tributes to the selves that wanted me to be married, wanted to find comfort in a cis-normative life, and wanted to be a ‘professional’ artist.”
Weis noted that the core of who he is today is possible because of these unlived selves, which he chose to commemorate through this piece. Those who attended were encouraged to bring a personal possession to leave in the installation — items that, for them, embodied a past or unfulfilled self they also wished to depart with or pay tribute to.
The Unavoidable, Extraordinary Imagination Behind Trash Art
Much of Weis’ artwork consists of discarded, abandoned materials he has collected and repurposed or incorporated in creative ways.
“I think we have to think about the enormous amounts of waste we’re generating, especially when people are constantly trying to make new things, but I’m not always trying to make a statement about that,” said Weis. “As an artist, trying to make a statement about what I’m going through often ends up happening through recycled materials, because these materials have been with me, and they’re endowed with a specific meaning that comes from being used.”
Oftentimes, using these materials has been the only option available.
“I’ve very much been on the fringe of losing a lot of stability and not being able to afford housing, especially with being a student,” he said. “It’s really hard to make it on minimum wage, and with student employment it’s either not enough compensation or not enough hours, so I’ve always had two jobs — or two jobs and a side gig — because paying for rent has been awful… In order to make it through my Fine Arts degree, a lot of my work has had to come from an extraordinary amount of imagination; my projects came from cardboard and plastics that I’d collected, and I was just trying to make do with what I had in a certain way.”
In 2021, Weis created a series of sculptural pieces — titled Mending — using collected plastics and cardboard to embody his reflections on personal experiences with displacement and abandonment. 
In November, Weis was able to host an art show at the Darkside Cinema featuring illustrations, collages, and conceptual trash sculptures that he described as being the result of “play and exploration”. He was not able, however, to dedicate much energy to promoting the show, having still been in the midst of relocating while simultaneously juggling school and work at that time.
“During that period of time, I’m collecting all the trash I’m using and making it into this body of work, because it’s all really emotional to me since it’s all I have in the moment, and because I lost a lot of my possessions, which isn’t a new experience for me,” he said. “When I moved to Oregon a few years ago, I came out as trans; my family disowned me and I had no money, so I was living with random people. And I was just making art with what I had, which was usually trash, and I guess I carried that with me because it’s kind of an emotional thing when you know that’s all you have. It becomes the tool of art.”
According to Weis, much of this instability arose after not being able to have a relationship with his family, to the point where even asking for help was no longer an option.
“A lot of that stems from just being queer,” he said. “It’s not a mystery as to why a lot of queer students and queer people — especially queer people of color — deal with cyclical displacement and inability to afford basic things.”
Future Projects, and Evolving as an Artist
For the Valley Library Reading Room, Weis is currently organizing a Spring Call for Art that touches on the theme of healing — be it “the ecological or physical process of repair, the emotional process of finding safety and comfort, the personal journeys taken to find stability”, or whatever else healing means to the artists.
Additionally, Weis is working as an installation assistant for the Spring Term BFA Solo Exhibitions, an opportunity for senior-year art students to curate a public, week-long display of their work that’s set to a specific theme. For his own exhibition, which will take place in Snell Hall from May 23 to 28 and consist entirely of installation work, Weis will incorporate, in a to-be-determined sculptural form, Measuring Success, Picking at Scabs — a project composed of dried pools of glue that have absorbed loose debris from the desks of various art students at OSU, as tribute to the subtle traces, and legacies, left behind by his peers.
“A big source of my community has been the art program [at OSU],” he said. “Hilariously enough, a lot of art people end up being queer people as well.”
Another piece Weis will include in his exhibition is a roughly 20-pound, egg-like assemblage of pieces of torn canvases, drawings, newspapers, cardboard, and sewing patterns that made its debut at the Corvallis Garbage Fest. He describes it as a conceptual trash installation that is “eating” all of his former work.
“That egg emerged as I was helping so many other BFA artists work on their culminating exhibitions — I had a moment of panic because I really didn’t feel like I had a body of work that resonated with where I’ve been as a student in and out of school for seven years,” said Weis. “I thought a lot about the labor involved in toting paintings from city to city so that I’d be able to have them for my show, for school, and I honestly felt like destroying them and changing their form was a positive evolution. I started tearing canvases and pieces of sculpture and forming an egg — something that symbolizes rebirth.”
Initially intended to be a sculpture, Weis describes the egg as a sort of performance piece — one he lives with and continues to “feed” with former artwork, rendering it in a constant state of flux. He intends to keep making art and subsequently incorporating that into the egg as he goes.
“In the destruction of former artwork through my egg, there is the acknowledgment that I can and will create again,” said Weis. “So often, artists and myself hold onto work past its natural life so that we can prove we’re artists. I have found it hopeful to destroy previous works because I’m not reliant on past art to define the evolution of my art practice.”
Registration to submit art for the Reading Room Healing collection is open until April 12 and can be completed here. Book or other media suggestions for the collection can be submitted here. For more information, email Weis at weisha@oregonstate.edu.
By Emilie Ratcliff
Do you have a story for The Advocate? Email editor@corvallisadvocate.com