Elizabeth Fox
The exhibition Elizabeth Fox: Goddess In A Bubble Jacket presents new work by painter Elizabeth Fox, who lives in Standish, Maine. Fox is widely known for her carefully crafted paintings, whose tender colors and precisely drawn subjects belie their sly, dark humor. She works in an exacting, traditional method that connects her work to the early Renaissance masters. The pristine surfaces of her paintings are achieved by applying multiple thin layers of oil paint over a detailed black-and-white underpainting. Each layer is allowed to dry before adding the next, slowly building the image with each successive layer. Embracing “the beautiful and the mundane,” Fox’s meticulously constructed images reference Pop culture, art history, and the mysteries of everyday life. Populated by figures engaged in action and full of personality, her narratives are open-ended, allowing their interpretation to change over time. Each scene is caught in a frozen moment, a “cut” from a fantastical film of life. "By emphasizing the relationships between people, objects, color, and space, everyday scenes can become mysterious, funny, or strange,” she says.
Elizabeth Fox was born in Orlando, Florida, and attended the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota. She lived in New Orleans for eighteen years before moving to Maine in 2008. Fox has exhibited her work widely at galleries across the United States and the Netherlands. She has had twelve solo exhibitions, including Played to Win at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in 2014.
The bubble jacket is a symbol of strength, resilience, and overcoming. It represents inner strength. The jacket is a symbol of power.
What is a bubble goddess - a woman emboldened by spirit
What is a bubble jacket - symbol of spirit and power
What is zen (logo) mania - burst of spirit
The 3 shoe box paintings mix folk, merchandising and streetwear. Depicting hip-hop fashion and bad-ass poses to bring you power and freedom. They are painted on collaborative logo shoe boxes acting as a fashion backdrop to the characters. One has several portrayals of Jam Master Jay from Run DMC and others have hip-hop poses from early male groups but with women instead of men. The Jam Master Jay collection has a field of self styled hand printed zen (logo) mania (a nod to Dapper Dan) on which the characters stand. Framed on shipping pallets made to scale and showcased with display case plexiglass.
The vessels with dancers are inspired by 90’s New Orleans outsider artist Chuck Crosby who paint-ed Egyptian Chagall-like characters on bleach bottles in the style of Greek clay vessels. All are images of breaking free from the finite world of thought into a poetic world of awareness.
The cardboard pieces are a modern take on Bill Traylor’s folk art. In This Way the characters are pointing (a device in drag runway performance) to where they are walking toward. A place unseen, out of frame while swimming in a hand-printed zen (logo) mania of bubbles, a Louis Vuitton-esque homemade branding. The other, a character “Lil Paintsy” is reflecting on herself in a sea of paint brushes with paint drips, a Gucci-esque homemade branding.