Elizabeth Schwaiger: Now & Now & Now

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.

–Excerpt from “Diving into the Wreck” by Adrienne Rich

Nicola Vassell is pleased to announce exclusive representation of painter Elizabeth Schwaiger, and her first solo exhibition at the gallery. Opening on January 11, 2024, Now & Now & Now, will include 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. Schwaiger renders these ethereal domains with dissonant materials; she applies watercolor, acrylic, ink, and oil to canvas in chromatically harmonious, but thinly veiled layers that bleed, permeate, and blur into overgrown, evanescent sceneries. 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. 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.