Elizabeth Michelman – Statement

As an artist I am a subversive teacher. Producing visual-verbal paradox and pleasure is merely the means: my end is to turn the viewer’s curiosity back upon herself. My interdisciplinary visual art explores the connections between disparate pathways of perceiving, thinking, and feeling. Each project, whether site-responsive installation, community participatory action, or video, integrates some combination of disciplines—sculpture, drawing, writing, music, and poetry, embedded in a familiar physical or cultural environment. The viewer, propelled through actual space or intrigued by the sequence of a video, encounters non-verbal imagery joined with verbal stimuli such as baby-babble, repeated phrases, or odd orderings of formalized language. The attractive clash of medium seduces— frustrates— and ultimately rewards the viewer, who is made aware of her mind’s own creative effort to assimilate and account for its bewilderment.