Battlegrounds

Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition of recent work by 2021 Real Art Award recipient Elizabeth Flood.

Through her ongoing practice of painting outdoors in the elements, Flood surveys complex layers of extraction, violence, and expression within the American landscape. The artworks in the exhibition were made at Civil War battlefields in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and Chancellorsville, Virginia, and at the U.S. Capitol. These works commune with and bear witness to the land: they look at past scars to grieve, to learn, to forecast future impact, and to keep watch over a country and land in crisis.

Battlegrounds is built around a body of work made over the last year and a half, comprising six paintings and eighteen drawings. Together, these artworks express the chaos of our current national landscape and the emotional weight of the charged terrain Flood depicts. The black and white ink drawings are tangled and urgent, each a watchful and restless representation of the battlefields as they exist today. The paintings are atmospheric and embodied, drawing color from witness boulders, local flora, and the earth itself. Their surfaces are gritty reliefs, connoting calluses, cast iron plaques, or imagined burials for those who perished nearby. Flood’s largest painting, “Battlefield (Chancellorsville, summer),” consists of nine separate panels and incorporates grasses from the battlefield into humid August greens. Combining different vantage points and elevations into one turbulent cycle, it grapples with a painful past and present.

FEB 17 – JUN 12
OPEN WE-FR: 4-CLOSE; SA & SU: 2-CLOSE

HOURS:
WEDNESDAY – FRIDAY
4 – 9PM
SATURDAY & SUNDAY
2 – 9PM