“Elizabeth Alexander makes sculptures, drawings, and installations through an ongoing process of deconstruction and reconstruction of objects, images, or spaces through cycles of concealment and reveal. Referencing architecture and landscape, D.I.Y. culture and decorative arts, her material exploration confronts a piecemeal narrative of an inflated American Dream by questioning perceptions of status, beauty, femininity, and class. Using domestic materials such as decorative wallpaper, images from coffee table books, and porcelain teacups, Alexander carves out environments that give equal tribute to domestic decoration and its deterioration.”
-Flanders Gallery
Spit Cake (Detail)
Boston Sculptors Gallery member Elizabeth Alexander has her work in four museum shows this month- two of which are in New England. Don't miss out on the chance to see her work locally this winter and keep an eye out for her work that is touring nationally:
1. Idle Trades, New Bedford Art Museum/ArtWorks!, Jan 19th-March 20th 2016. Idle Trades features the work of Elizabeth Alexander, Tim Bearse, Sam Duket, Brad Fesmire, Matt Murphy, and Neal Walsh. According to curator Elizabeth Murphy, “this exhibition explores what it means to create—that is, to work—by presenting a range of pieces that emphasize process. Each piece hints at the ideas from which the work proceeded, embracing at the same time notions of vision and revision.” Alexander's work "Queen's Garden II " in Idle Trades is hand cut found porcelain from a series called 'Heirloom.'
Queen's Garden II
2. State of the art: Discovering American Art Now, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Feb 18th-May 29th 2016. Liz is exhibiting a few pieces from her series called 'Heirloom,' in this travelling exhibition which was organized by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.
Spit Cake
3. State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now, Telfair Museums, Feb 19th-Sept 4th 2016. Liz is exhibiting a few pieces from her series called 'Heirloom,' in this travelling 'State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now' exhibition which was organized by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.
Gunpowder
4. Paper and Blade: Modern Paper Cutting, Fuller Craft Museum, Feb 20th-July 24th 2016.
"The work Gunpowder, created for Paper and Blade, is assembled out of 3 separate dissected rolls of vintage floral and toile wallpaper. The wallpaper, broken down by extracting the pattern by hand, is reduced to piles of color and shapes to be reordered into separate collages of its positive and negative components. Through this process the body of the paper is filled with wayward voids and the pattern becomes oversaturated through the loss of its ground, both losing some of their domestic qualities. When arranging the material into new fields of color and pattern I am struck by the direct metamorphic effects my own hand can have. I am literally causing the material to disintegrate and regenerate as I work. Because my methods are so laborious and visible, time becomes both a subject and a medium, present in the identity of the material, my process, and the result."
-Elizabeth Alexander