“Night Fell”
August 5, 2015 – September 6, 2015
Opening Reception: Wednesday, August 5th, 7-9pm
[link to Press Release: English / 中文]
The Lodge Gallery is proud to present “Night Fell,” a solo exhibition of paintings by Elizabeth Livingston, on view August 5 through September 6, 2015.
Alfred Hitchcock and Johannes Vermeer both took great delight in peeling back veneers of suburban order to capture intimate moments, exposing the vulnerability of domesticated middle class life. Elizabeth Livingston’s most recent body of work evokes all the same cinematic emphasis on visual scrutiny, moments of false security, and entrapment by employing hyper-detailed patterns of juxtaposed fabric to adorn her subjects against stark planes of color and narrative light. There is a shared suspense in these voyeuristic moments, a sense of the quiet before the storm or the last rays of dusk light before night falls.
As Livingston explains, “[the paintings] are both safe houses and defenseless outposts about to be consumed by night.”
This ominous undercurrent of isolation is both palpable and intentional in her most recent work as well. In “Night Fell”, the title work of the exhibition, we glimpse a dim glow of light from the porch of a quaint two floor home that is both inviting and fragile, stable but vulnerable, and surrounded by the obsessive detail of the lush encroaching rural landscape.
As described in her own words, “In more recent work I’m pulling back from the figure, to focus on exterior views of a larger scene. In these paintings, the figure is no longer visible, but a human presence is clearly felt through dimly lit windows. A small country home at dusk with the porch light on reads both as a safe house and as defenseless outpost against the dark woods surrounding it. The tension in this divergence, to me, is a reflection on how beautifully fragile our lives are.”
Elizabeth Livingston attended Yale University, where she received a BA in fine art in 2001 and an MFA from Boston University in 2006. Livingston has been included in numerous exhibitions in Boston, MA, New Haven, CT, Fort Worth, TX, and New York City, among others. She has been an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center and the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming and recently closed a solo exhibition at the University of Maine Museum of Art. Her work has been widely collected throughout the U.S. and Europe. Livingston currently lives and works in New York City.
