Elizabeth Hazan

Next Door Guest: Gracie DeVito, Daniel Rios-Rodriguez, Aaron Spangler

Johannes Vogt Gallery is pleased to present its first solo show with Elizabeth Hazan, Heat Wave. The paintings in the exhibition explore the personal connections one has to a landscape, and how pictorial representations affect our relationship to that time and place.

The charged climate of the works in Heat Wave belie a subtle and pensive look at the passage of time and the nostalgia for a place that will never exist again. Memory is a fallable instrument where even the very act of recalling a moment, person, place, or time can distort it. Photographs and images distort our memories even further, supplanting the memory of viewing actual first-person experience with the static image. Hazan’s landscapes-not-landscapes entreat the viewer to digest the formal dynamics of line moving through space and color while leaving behind subtle hints as to what histories these moments might hide. Heat Wave is a mirage of memories.

Hazan’s paintings begin fluidly and gesturally with watercolor and inks. Where her previous body of work focused on the influence that a map has on a person’s experience of a place and began with simple collages or sections of aerial maps, her current body takes a more personal approach to the themes of landscape and memory. For Hazan this free-er, looser method of formulating composition allows her to imbue emotive qualities of these experiences into her paintings. The imaginary landmasses and skies that recall uncanny forms created by distant wildfires feel both improbable and yet true. The reconstructions from the mind’s eye drift off of hot asphalt and ripple in the August sun. Her paintings are a telephone game of images and memory lead towards pieces of near abstraction with strong references towards Joan Mitchell, Joan Snyder and Arshile Gorky. Hazan’s abstractions are embued with rich saturated colors and meandering topographies of vibrant light.

Elizabeth Hazan has studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the New York Studio School and Bryn Mawr College. In addition to her own artistic practice, Hazan founded Platform Project Space, dedicated to showcasing the work of fellow artists. Her works have been shown in exhibitions at Geoffrey Young Gallery, Great Barrington, MA: National Arts Club, New York, NY; LABspace, Hillsdale, NY; Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, NY; and Sideshow Gallery, Brooklyn, NY.