Elizabeth Malaska

Region: Pacific Coast

Website: http://elizabethmalaska.com

City / State: Portland, OR

Looking is creation—a political act. We make sense of the world through the meanings ascribed to what we see. I am concerned with hegemonic sight, which is often a tool of violent and destructive forces. My work disrupts such assured vision.

Of special interest to me is the ubiquitous and normalized use of the female body, often naked, throughout art history. My work questions this practice by recontextualizing these bodies. Placing the familiar in unfamiliar contexts gives the figures more agency and challenges viewers to question their own power and positions. The figures in my current work occupy ruins. For thousands of years, patriarchial destruction has possessed our world. It is with great urgency that I imagine an end to this devastation and the beginnings of something new. These beginnings aren’t easy or whole—yet. Nonetheless, despite their vulnerability and instability, these figures possess an unapologetic power. Rising from the wreck of the old order, they look past us, keeping watch for the new world to come.