My visual art highlights connections among disparate thoughts and ways of thinking. My site-responsive installations often incorporate sculpture, drawing, language and poetry. Developing related themes, my video explores the shape and meaning of movement within in an environment, accentuating the flow of time through sound or its conspicuous absence. Emotion is the linking force unifying these combined and conflicting forms of expression. I have curated and participated in exhibitions of temporary outdoor installation with Studios Without Walls in Brookline for several years, including, in spring 2007, the migrating exhibition “Art on the Wing,” sited progressively at the MassAudubon Boston Nature Center in Mattapan and the Riverway Park in Brookline. I have shown other installations and videos at many other New England public institutions and galleries, including Dartmouth College, The Derryfield School in Manchester, N.H., the Boston Public Library, and the Brookline Library. Both my installations and video integrate a combination of disciplines—sculpture, drawing, writing, and reduced poetic speech. Sometimes they require audience participation. When designing a work for a public place or documenting its spirit with the video camera, I study the habits and flow of its users and inhabitants, drawing out both cultural and subjective associations with the site to make these visual contexts my own. I enjoy the challenge of reaching out to unconventional “audiences” by surprising passersby with dialogue in unexpected sites: the approach to a courtroom, the stairwell of a psychoanalytic institute, a farmyard fence or woodland clearing. In my frequent use of technology and industrially mass-produced materials, I downplay craft in favor of minimal moves to engage the human hand, eye, and active imagination in shaping, arranging, and, finally, interpreting the material and its context. The viewers’ own physical movements lead them to encounter known forms in unfamiliar ways. In the presence of babble, repeated phrases, or odd orderings of formalized language, they are further enticed to sound out new thoughts and seek meaning in them. Ultimately, the work reflects the viewers’ own humanity and turns their curiosity back upon themselves. Elizabeth Michelman has taught at Mass College of Art, the Currier Gallery of Art, and other local colleges, schools, and museums. She received a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grant 2000 for her works on paper, and has been awarded grants 1996-2006 from Brookline Arts Commission and North Attleboro Cultural Council, and in 2005 from the Brookline Community Foundation. She co-chairs Brookline Sculptors Studios Without Walls and formerly co-chaired Brookline Arts Council. She is currently a national affiliate member at SOHO20/Chelsea Gallery in New York City, where she recently exhibited. She was educated at Dartmouth College, A.B. 1976; Georgetown University J.D. 1980; SMFA/Boston, diploma 1992.
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| ezwordz@hotmail.com |
Mailing
Address
| 53 Brington Road Brookline MA 02446 |