ARTIST STATEMENT
In her most recent album, Florence Welch sings: “It’s good to be alive / Crying into cereal at midnight… When I decided to wage holy war / It looked very much like staring at my bedroom floor.” I imagine that she sits by herself at night, her mental spinnings strange and unintelligible to anyone else. In this kind of primal, irrational space, she composes her subjectivity. She makes her aloneness a solid state to inhabit. She tells the story of her life, repeating it back to herself until it becomes undiminishable, and in doing so, becomes her own hero.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Elizabeth is an emerging artist based in Chicago with roots in San Jose, CA. She received her B.A. in human development from the University of Chicago, where she focused on social anthropology and disordered eating. Her painting practice began in 2020, as a means to contemplate the condition of being a person in this beautiful and absurd modern world. Elizabeth’s work is often mixed-media; you will see lots of declarative colors, strong contrast, and odd text overlays in her pieces. Elizabeth’s identity as a second-generation Chinese-American woman lays the backdrop of all her work, whether it is the explicit subject or merely a footnote.
© Elizabeth Shen