Elizabeth Duffy

Chatterbox 2013

An ever-present restlessness and a love of the material world drive me to uncover the secret beauty in the ordinary. The materials I choose are often overlooked: swept up in a studio cleaning spree or found in the back of a desk drawer, they come from the activities of daily life. They acknowledge in-between moments, times when people seem most content: picking up mail from the post office box, going for a drive, stopping to pet a dog at the corner deli. My work identifies the material substance of these moments and celebrates their nobility. Notebook reinforcement labels, maps and security envelopes were the cumbersome artifacts of daily life, yet they once safeguarded privacy and preserved the otherwise transient life of the documents that defined us.Often the materials I choose have a poignancy for their inevitable obsolescence.

In these drawings from circle reinforcement labels I explore the way the play of light can show off this once important office supply. Freed from their task of holding sheets in 3-ring binders, these small white circles within circles are infinitely mutable and when arranged can evoke early American white-on-white quilts or the Minimalist drawings of Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt. They connect the past paper world to today’s information age. They have a presence when layered and folded, casting and reflecting light as the ambient light changes, or as the viewer changes position.

- Elizabeth

CV

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS:

Drawing Center, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, White Columns, the Strauss Gallery at Dartmouth College, Pentimenti Gallery, Dam Stuhltrager Gallery, Elizabeth Harris Gallery, Nikolai Fine Art, Holland Tunnel Gallery, Wave Hill, The Islip Museum, raw & co. Gallery, Hunter College Leubsdorf Gallery, Muriel Guépin Gallery and DM Contemporary.
 
SELECTED RESIDENCIES:
Bogliasco Foundation/Liguria Center for the Arts and Humanities in Bogliasco, Italy (2012), the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council on Governors Island (2012), the Corporation of Yaddo, where she was awarded the Louise Bourgeois Residency (2010, 2000), the MacDowell Colony (2005, 2004. 2003, 2002), the Vermont Studio Center (1997), and Ragdale (2004, 2003). She is also the recipient of awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, where she was Felissimo Honoree (2001), the Pollock Krasner Foundation (2001), and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts (2010).
 
SELECTED COLLECTIONS:
Deutsche Bank, Fidelity Investments, the Heard Museum, Dartmouth College Rauner Special Collections Library, and in numerous private collections. Her work has been written about in the New York Times, Art News, Art on Paper, the Boston Globe, the Village Voice, and many other publications. She received her MFA from CUNY Brooklyn College and studied art at the New York Studio School, Hunter College and Rutgers College. She lives and works between Providence, RI, and Acworth, NH, and teaches in the Art Department at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island.
 
ARTIST PROFILE ON OUR BLOG: ELIZABETH DUFFY

Elizabeth's mixed media includes some or all of:  gouache, house paint, canvas, cut paper, installation, drawing, sculpture, photo transfer, business envelopes, cleaning products, lint, maps and office supplies