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Elizabeth Powell: Caged
June 10, 2023 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm MDT
Elizabeth Powell’s work is comprised of abstract shapes and patterns. During the pandemic, she largely focused on creating small paintings because of limited studio space and a desire for easily portable materials. She is using the residency at Surel’s Place to explore how her individual works of art can exist on a larger scale, focusing on two larger canvases. This continued expansion is fitting since this work developed during one of the most constricting situations imaginable: while she was immobilized during an illness. Experiencing physical limitations, she instinctively began to draw and abstract the shape of her own body to reconnect with it and to reclaim it.
An overlying skeletal structure often accompanies these forms, but they entered Elizabeth’s work from a surprising source.
“On a quest for plain, utilitarian underwear, I was pulled into the abyss of online shopping,” she says. “I am fascinated by over-the-top lingerie, which is both impractical and outlandish. I am intrigued by the way the fabric forces women’s bodies into geometric shapes, as if they are packaged into a smaller container.”
It was after this when the cage or net-like imagery became a part of the work, informed by her studies in gender inequality and its expression in form, pattern and color.
Free.
Elizabeth PowellMay - June
Elizabeth Powell is a painter and printmaker in Burlington, Vermont.
She earned her MA and MFA in Printmaking and Painting from the University of Iowa in 2020 and a BA in Economics and Fine Arts from the University of Vermont in 2016. She has a keen interest in color theory, patterning, and the morphology of shapes as psychological representations of femininity.
Having extensively studied gender inequality in her economic studies, Powell explores the way the same sociological differences that lead to a systemic economic imbalance between men and women, present themselves in visual taste for form, pattern, and color.
Since finishing her MFA, Powell has had solo shows in Iowa and upstate New York and is looking forward to her 2023 solo exhibition with Kishka Gallery in White River Junction, Vermont.
Powell has attended residencies with BreckCreate in Breckenridge, Colorado; InCahoots in Petaluma, California; and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico.
During her residency, Powell led a workshop on the creation of hand printed linocuts focused on pattern.
Powell exhibited her work and gave an artist talk at the end of her residency. Her work wass comprised of abstract shapes and patterns. During the pandemic, she largely focused on creating small paintings because of limited studio space and a desire for easily portable materials. She used the residency at Surel's Place to explore how her individual works of art can exist on a larger scale, focusing on two larger canvases. This continued expansion is fitting since this work developed during one of the most constricting situations imaginable: while she was immobilized during an illness. Experiencing physical limitations, she instinctively began to draw and abstract the shape of her own body to reconnect with it and to reclaim it.
An overlying skeletal structure often accompanies these forms, but they entered Elizabeth's work from a surprising source. "On a quest for plain, utilitarian underwear,
I was pulled into the abyss of online shopping. I am fascinated by over-the-top lingerie, which is both impractical and outlandish. I am intrigued by the way the fabric forces women’s bodies into geometric shapes, as if they are packaged into a smaller container." It was after this, the cage or net-like imagery became a part of the work, informed by her studies in gender inequality and its expression in form, pattern, and color.