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Statement
My paintings investigate physical surface, speculative architecture, and a questioning of representation in environmental space. They begin with geometric line drawings that become non-rectangular structures, supporting a mixed topography of a dyed canvas ground and subsequent layering of paint. The resulting image creates a spatial illusion, while also brushing up against the physical fact of woven fabric, as well as the natural materials of rubbed or attached stone, paint, and wood. There is interplay with transparency, structure, natural materials, and staining/dyeing. The work is in part dictated by process, though it also connects to historical painting languages. The work on paper submitted for this open call is a preliminary way for me to think about color, space, and composition. I often work off of the paper studies in building into larger paintings, and find that the use of acrylic in the studies challenges my relationship to color and material with other mediums. The “project” of painting for me has also become contingent on many things within and outside this medium, including utopian architecture, Anni Albers’ ethics of material, archives of female geologists, rock quarries, and an experience among treeless, uninhabited islands in the Bering Sea. Marked by human history, these islands and other experiences have led me to question how the condition of remoteness bears a phenomenological relationship to painting and abstraction. In addition, I consider the connection of words to rhythm and weight, as well as the overlap of writing to drawing, drawing to painting. Moving in and out of drawing and painting languages, and working between painting and sculpture, I consider the experience of a body in a space, both lost and found.
Bio
Eleanor Conover is an artist whose work engages with the physical and material conditions of painting as a metaphor for environmental time and space. Recent past exhibitions include Abattoir, Cleveland, OH; Hudson House, Hudson, NY; Bad Water, Knoxville, TN; and Ortega y Gasset Projects, Brooklyn, NY. She was the 2022 Donald J. Gordon visiting artist at Swarthmore College, and was the 2020-21 recipient of the Wellesley College Alice C. Cole ’42 fellowship. Her practice has also been supported through artist residencies including The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation, Cow House Studios, and the Joseph A. Fiore Art Center. With an interest in land and the environment, she has additionally engaged in the research of geologic histories in Philadelphia, PA and visual work regarding ecology in coastal places as remote as the Aleutian Islands, AK. Born in Hartford, CT in 1988, she earned an MFA at Tyler School of Art, Temple University (2018) and a BA from Harvard College (2010). She received a post-MFA teaching fellowship at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and currently resides in Carlisle, PA, where she is an Assistant Professor of Art at Dickinson College.
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