Elizabeth Moylan

I believe that painting, especially now, demands bravery. If I didn't have skin in the game, I wouldn't need to make the work. For me, painting is the most honest form of thinking. Even as I reach the end of a painting, it remains an open form. The work only seems to belong to me, when it actually always already belonged to the world. My consciousness is a composite of memory, a collage of outside influences, and as I put that in the work, I find that the world emerges again, slightly reconfigured, through my hands. When I paint, I gain radical access to my own physical, emotional, and intellectual permeability. I embrace with exuberance the impossibility of doing anything untouched by history, as that creates the freedom to explore the multiplicity of meaning within painterly gesture itself. Mark-making is a code of signs, complete with its own idioms.The permeability of human consciousness is essential to the work because it creates a space for the historically distinct models of image-making and narrative I use to echo off one another. In the space of the painting, I aim to create a resonance within the consciousness of the viewer that breaks the boundaries of the object itself.

School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, MFA, awarded 2018

School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, Post-Baccalaureate, awarded 2016

The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, BA, awarded 2007

SAIC MFA Show, Sullivan Galleries, 2018

Netflix and Chill, D&S Gallery, 2017

Painting at the End of the World, SAIC, 2016

Bad Painting, SAIC, 2016