Elizabeth Schwaiger

"the thing I came for:

the wreck and not the story of the wreck

the thing itself and not the myth

the drowned face always staring

toward the sun

the evidence of damage

worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty

the ribs of the disaster

curving their assertion

among the tentative haunters."

—Adrienne Rich, "Diving into the Wreck"

Nicola Vassell is pleased to present Now & Now & Now, a solo exhibition of new works by the Brooklyn-based painter Elizabeth Schwaiger. Now & Now & Now includes a new series of paintings offering expeditions into unpeopled spaces, unrestrained nature, and uncanny interiors. Submerging herself into physical and psychic depths, she found her subject matter in the art studio—understood both as a historic site to preserve relics of creative ritual, and an expressive place that she can inhabit, at times, more intimately than her own body.

Shaped by her personal experiences with childbirth and scuba diving—empirically disparate but sensorially analogous—Schwaiger’s life and practice are subsumed by forces greater than herself.

In pregnancy, the boundaries of one’s own body and mind cannot be relied upon as both are ultimately subject to the phenomena of the physical world. Nature is a mother, full of rage, uncontrollable, creative, destructive, self-sacrificing—birther of all. In scuba diving, a weightless disruption of the senses leads to a dizzying surrender of one’s awareness to the unknown depths. Fears and hopes are no longer intellectual or emotional exercises, but become physical knowledge, visceral experiences. Schwaiger’s compositions capture an ominous placidity in which it is unclear whether one is staring into the eye of, or the wake of, her inner tempest.

Schwaiger’s compositions capture an ominous placidity in which it is unclear whether one is staring into the eye of, or the wake of, her inner tempest. As in the poem “Dear Darkening Ground” by Rainer Maria Rilke, the world she characterizes and speaks to has “endured so patiently the walls we’ve built / perhaps you’ll give the cities one more hour,” and portends the moment “before you become forest again, and water, and widening / wilderness / in that hour of inconceivable terror / when you take back your name / from all things.” Her interiors are ruins built with contradiction, at once gentle, meticulous archives, and fragile, fleeting wreckages. They are artifacts of nature’s inevitable cycles. With each work, she confronts the concept of an overwhelming and powerful might pushing in, either as a consequence of hubris, indifference, or misguided attempts to dominate decay.

Elizabeth Schwaiger (b. 1985, Texas) is a research-based artist living and working in Brooklyn. In her decade-long exploration of power dynamics and the climate crises, Schwaiger has used a variegated symbolism of water, fracturing, dimensional overlay, gesture, and dialed levels of representational clarity to construct images suggestive of the interplay among unseen forces that govern our world.