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"St. George Triptych", 2007, acrylic on canvas by Elizabeth Wade. |
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Maryland Fellow shows at FAWC
Banner Staff
Elizabeth Wade, the 2007 recipient of the Maryland Institute Fellowship at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, will have a solo exhibition of new paintings at the Fine Arts Work Center’s Hudson D. Walker Gallery, 24 Pearl St May 2 – 20. There will be an opening reception for the artist at the gallery on Friday, May 2 from 6 to 8 p.m.
Wade was born in Charlotte, North Carolina. She received her BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1997, then spent the next eight years in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and rural Northern Arizona developing her studio practice. She completed her MFA with distinction at the Maryland Institute College of Art’s Hoffberger School of Painting in 2007, where she studied closely with, and served as assistant to, famed Abstract Expressionist painter Grace Hartigan and noted New York City-based critic Dominique Nahas.
She has exhibited her work in California, Arizona, Virginia, and Maryland, and recently received an Individual Artist’s Grant from the City of Baltimore. She currently maintains her studio in Baltimore, Maryland, where she also teaches college-level drawing and color theory.
In her artist statement she writes, “Each person has an inner world that is dark, vulnerable, and hilarious, comprised of things barely grasped and hardly conscious. It is crowded with obsessions, things dreamt about at night, things not told to anyone, odd corners the mind turns which cannot be explained. This is what humans are, a murky soup of thought and feeling, the greater part of which is never expressed.
I explore themes of cruelty and devotion, often through the lens of female sexuality and desire.
The figures in my paintings are caught in the act—of ecstasy, of violence, of vanishing, of transformation. They are funny and lonely, awkward and voracious, drooling, animalistic creatures whose desires are a source of power and of subjugation. They assert with unvarnished frankness that to be female is foremostly to be human, and that to be human is to be flawed, fallible, vulnerable, and wild.
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May 1st, 2008