MOCA GA / Calendar

2015/2016 Working Artist Project

This round of Working Artist Project was curated by Saisha Grayson, Assistant Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum, New York.

“I was really impressed by the complexity and variety of work shared with me by the applicants for this award and am thrilled that the three artists selected will have support over the coming year to pursue their diverse practices and share them with Atlanta audiences. Olufani’s engagement with the politics of history and memory for communities of color ranges across media with an effective poeticism. Frank’s large format photographs create a monumentality for subjects and social rituals that are infrequently depicted in art, inviting viewers to think harder about their significance and meaning. Lide’s quiet dialogue with tactile materials leads her to develop intimate installations that simultaneously evoke the domestic and the archive. I look forward to seeing what they do with this opportunity.” –Saisha Grayson

Elizabeth Lide: Putting the House in Order

In the fall of 2014, I organized my studio, as well as rooms in my house, taking off the top layer of unwanted stuff, clearing the way to see and think more clearly, and to recognize connections in my artwork over many years. Ordering space became a focus in my new drawings, architectural yet unrealistic, presenting shapes without true function. Pages were broken up in ways that felt meditative, the structure of grids regulating and introducing the notion of repositories, and circles referencing wholeness, eternal cycles and portals. Touching and seeing, with fresh eyes, objects in my studio and house triggered memories and associations. I categorized and archived some of the papers and objects, especially from my father’s family who tended to keep things, beautiful objects to the ordinary. In paper pulp, plaster, and aluminum, I molded some of the “finer” objects passed down from my grandparents and great-grandparents. I used materials accumulated through the years: cotton sock tops, Fabriano Mill paper samples, odd pieces of fabric, suture and cotton threads, bronze papers left behind by a dear friend, a tattered quilted bedspread, now cut, painted and stitched. As I developed the pieces, they began to play with one another, my father’s 8mm home movies influencing drawings, stitchery, and molded objects. How have the things around me affected the way I live my life, my approach to making art, my comfort/discomfort in physical spaces, and how I share my past? During a residency at VCCA, I discovered a poem by Ha Jin who had also been a fellow there. The Past connected so closely to my work that I have carried it with me ever since and, with permission, the poem is part of my installation.

Artist Talk: January 28, 2017