Shifting matters by Elisabeth Heyling

Shifting Matters: a solo exhibition by Elisabeth Heying
August 5 – 27, 2022
Matter endures until it doesn’t, and then it becomes something else; we don’t notice until we do, and then what becomes of us? Shifting Matters is an exhibition of paintings exploring the transience of our surroundings, the fluidity of the stationary, and our ever-human response to change. This body of work investigates the material of paint and the materiality of the world around us as a negotiation of time, space, and energy.

Elisabeth is an artist, material researcher and educator. Her paintings explore place, landscape and surface as records of and containers for human experience. The inherent identities of material, both within the landscape and within the painting process, serve as a reflexive key to unlocking connection between people and place. In Elisabeth’s work, the painted surface plays different roles from one piece to the next to mirror the process of perception. Paint is used as color and form to render pictorial space, it’s accrued to physically evoke textured surfaces, and it’s used in complement to the actual minerals and objects of the land. This varied approach to materiality engages ideas of truth and artifice, nature and construction, and entropy and control as poetic metaphor.
Born in Minnesota, Elisabeth has been living and working in Chicago, IL since 2011. She received both her MFA in Painting & Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 2022, and her BFA in 2015. Elisabeth was the director of a state of the art facility called StudioLab at SAIC, where she educated students on how to make and use traditional and modern painting and drawing materials for over six years. She developed education resource collections including a Library, a Material Archive of historic pigments and materials and a Virtual Database of instructional videos. Elisabeth received the Roads Scholarship for Research and Travel in 2020, has exhibited widely in group exhibitions throughout the Chicago area and debuted her first solo exhibition, Ache of Erosion, at SITE Galleries in 2021.