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Eliza Griffiths’ paintings present fictional characters in vividly rendered psycho-sexual tableaux that explore dimensions of intimacy, relationality and agency. The charismatic figures that people her paintings exude a sexuality that is complexly bound up with power, vulnerability and desire. The scenes frequently suggest identities in tough negotiations of their unique circumstances of life and love. Yet the theatricality of these scenes is not brought about through any explicit narrative; rather, dramatic suggestion is a narrative effect that arises from and through its richly achieved yet ambiguously expressive figural elements. The paintings presented in this exhibition open a new investigation by Griffiths that centers on the uneven transits between nurturance and dysfunction, tenderness and ineptitude, in female and male interactions. These new works, produced during the past year, nonetheless maintain stylistic and conceptual links to past series of work. Griffith’s paintings are notable for the extraordinary command of spatial composition and figure/ground relations through which she creates dynamic tension; the vivid tonalities of texture and color whose intensities carry psychological correlatives; and the narrative power of her encapsulated scenes of desiring beings. Whether wholly invented by the artist or drawn from mass market sources such as romance novels or movie ads, the characters who inhabit Griffiths paintings are far from predetermined. In working through the relational dynamics and personalities within the scenes she portrays, Griffiths may shift the genders of her characters back and forth on the canvas, or alter the staging itself, until her final versioning. The characters, though psychologically convincing, are less personages than animators of the psychic states the paintings bring to the fore. This process yields a rendering of relations of gender that tip narrative conventions and further grant focal interest and empowerment above all to her female characters. The worked and reworked surfaces, particularly the intensive attention to the portrayal of the faces, also harness the expressive potential of paint to the layered dimensionality - at once narrative and painterly - of her compositions. Eliza Griffiths was born in London, England, and immigrated to Canada as a child in the 1970s. A resident of Ottawa, she has exhibited across Canada, and in the United States and England. In 2002, Eliza Griffiths: 1995-2002 was mounted at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, NY, while another solo exhibition, Psycho-dramas in Painting, was seen at the Anna Leonowens Gallery at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, and at the Douglas Udell Gallery in Vancouver. Earlier in 2003, she participated in a group exhibition, Dress: Signal at the Mississauga Art Gallery, and in 2002, Posers, at Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery in Halifax, the latter accompanied by a catalogue. Her work has been featured in numerous Canadian periodicals, including the feature article, "The Devil in Ms. Griffiths," in Canadian Art, March 2002. |
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