STATEMENT OF WORK

Slowly Seeing

Artist Statement  - Elissa Greisz             

My artwork is a hybrid. My references and techniques are a mashup: nature/artifice, art/craft, macro/micro and holy/sensuous. I pull references from various cultures and use unusual materials – from linoleum floor tiling to nail polish to cast-off aluminum printing plates, in order to create a collage – like synthesis.  My work comes out of the tradition of pattern and decoration, whilst connecting to forms of collage.  These hybrid forms can be traced by to my early years. In the 1960’s I moved to the bohemian community of Topanga Canyon and attended art school at UCLA studying traditional forms of drawing and painting.  At school, I attended my first 1960’s “happening” – a performance work that did not end until everyone in the audience left. Soon after, I attended meetings at “Womanspace” – a feminist art collective started by Judy Chicago.  These experiences shifted my perspective and my work became more experimental and abstract as I began to paint with glitter and opalescent nail polish on rice paper and made sculpture with Wonder Bread.  In the 1980’s, I began to work with “iridescent diffraction foil” – a prismatic material I would order in bulk to create large weavings and sculptural wall works and installations.  Around this time, I started to glue the foil onto painted post cards and soon after, linoleum floor tiles and later aluminum lithography plates, creating large wall works of collaged forms.  More recently, I’ve made with work recycled sewing pattern paper.

I create imagery drawing on a variety of sources for inspiration, I borrow from Byzantine art, my Mexican heritage, sci-fi illustrations, other art, ornamentation, jewelry and tattoos.  My process of pattern and repetition is my method.  The transformation of inert materials becomes my modern-day alchemy. I’m an obsessive mark maker and continue experimenting, finding the unexpected, the strange and beautiful, the evocative, uncanny and the sometimes funny.