A Guide to Elizabeth Lax’s Body of Work
Our time with the second feverdream resident Elizabeth Lax has come to an end. During her two month stint Elizabeth came ready to take advantage of this opportunity and in doing so wowed us with her process and practice. She brought a lot of great energy (and banter) to our space and it was a pleasure to share the studio air with her. As we did share that air we got the chance to talk with Elizabeth at length about the work she was making. As we did with our previous resident, we are providing a more critical guide to the works that she created while she was in the Mezzanine studio.
Each work in the carousel is ordered chronologically in the order that she painted it. It’s important to note that all these works as of right now are untitled, and I will be referring to them as their respective ordinal number for clarity’s sake [we have now been provided titles!].
One really exciting prospect about Elizabeth’s proposal was her plan to make work that utilized being in the state of hypnagogia. Hypnagogia is a sleep cycle state before being fully asleep that causes hallucinations and vivid dreams that one can observe while being conscious. Historically, artists like Salvador Dali have utilized it because of the unbridled nature of imagery that derives from it. Elizabeth would set alarms during the night intermittently at the beginning of the residency to try and enter the state and record what she saw. In her first piece [titled Nostalgia] she had seen visions of a figure dancing around in mom jeans near her childhood home with this large purple foreboding form appearing as well. True to the hypnagogic visions she appropriated a figure from a vintage magazine ad for jeans and she sourced an image of the street by her childhood home. The rest of the formal choices were decisions she carefully made to lead the viewers into this state of unease. A pattern that repeats in Elizabeth’s work was how she tried to make innocent images slightly unnerving and eerie but in a fashion that could also be explained away. Her works straddled a line where something was definitely off in the scene. The unexplained child’s bicycle in this piece was definitely doing some heavy lifting in this sense, but also was the figure who seemingly didn’t belong in the scene at all. Elizabeth also distorted the figure with artifacting from old tapes to add to a sense of memory or nostalgia that comes into play with her later work.
“The state of hypnagogia is similar to REM sleep and occurs between waking and sleep. During this stage the mind is free from the logic provided by the prefrontal cortex.”
The second piece [titled Drunk On Love] she made moved away from her hypnagogia proposal in favor of a visual strategy she employs often in her oeuvre: rendering old archival digital and film photos. Something we understand at feverdream is that the proposal you set forth is not the end all be all for the direction the work should take. We like a more organic approach where things can change at the discretion of the artist. Elizabeth talked about how her night time timers were understandably affecting her ability to feel rested and focused so we changed tact! This piece focused on family and generational trauma cycles lined under feelings of nostalgia. It is not our story to share, but suffice to say that in family while things may seem great there can be a darker reality. Without knowing the story of Elizabeth’s family, one could surmise this based off of the cat eyes staring at the viewer rom the darkness on the right, as well as the hunting rifle on the table at this apparently happy moment between her grandparents.
The third painting [titled Grandma with Her Friends] Elizabeth made was also using older family photos on film. Her process was interesting because she is lucky enough to be in possession of thousands of photos, and hours upon hours of videos that her grandpa made in the middle of the 20th century. This piece depicts a blurry frame from a video of some of her older female relatives holding hands and spinning in a circle. That action is a metaphor for these generational trauma and cycles she’s interested in. This piece is also important because it looks like a cultic image—it depicts figures dressed in all white holding hands as if they were doing a ritual or seance. Cults and religion are topics that Elizabeth touches on often and this is the first time those topics were covered in the work she made for feverdream.
“The goal of my practice is to heal myself and others.”
The final piece [titled Sisters in Pageant] Elizabeth made used images that were closer to home, so to say. Her last painting appropriates more recent footage of her sisters in a Christmas pageant sometime in the mid 2000s. This painting perfectly encapsulates moments of what she had been doing in her previous three pieces: the film glitching distortion in the first piece, the nostalgia and palette in the second, and the representation of cults in the third. This piece is also a prime example of how something so innocent can appear unnerving. There is something to be said about how when children are painted that they can lend to feelings such as this. Artists like Loretta Lux and Nara capitalize on this connotation in their practices. The faces of her three sisters in the middle with the film distortion appear shocked or in pain when in actuality they are probably just singing. This final piece was a very strong finish to the stay of a fantastic resident.
