Check out Elizabeth Folk’s Artwork

Today we’d like to introduce you to Elizabeth Folk.

Elizabeth, we’d love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today both personally and as an artist.
I was born in Charlottesville, VA and emerged from the womb a dogged liberal. I was raised in a conservative household and attended a strict evangelical school. I have always been some form of artist/activist, though most early gestures took the form of what musician Jim White refers to as “aesthetic outbursts”- when the urge to express yourself comes on so strong you grab whatever is around and make a thing- but I didn’t know I was “doing art.” In 5th grade, I staged a protest during a school lesson about “a woman’s purpose” that was as fine as any performative intervention I have made to this day. Coming of age within an ideological system that was disparate to mine set me up for an extra dose of skepticism, and criticality that will always be a part of who I am. My parents have always encouraged my creative side, and that has made a huge impact on me believing it was possible to pursue my passion.

We’d love to hear more about your art. What do you do and why and what do you hope others will take away from your work?
I work in sculpture and time-based media, with empathy and social justice as points of departure. My recent work investigates the visual language of privilege and power in the United States through the defamiliarization of modernist design and iconography. I intervene upon the aesthetics of found mid-century modern furniture, home décor, and reimagine desert modern landscape design. Mid-century design notoriously embodies clean utilitarian lines, an understanding of materiality, and an appreciation of craft, but is born of an ideological era occurring before the Civil Rights Movement, before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and before the victories of second-wave feminism. In 2016, in efforts to put a time stamp on the “Again” in Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again,” Pew asked Americans if “life was better for people like them 50 years ago,” and most Republicans said yes.

I disrupt those clean lines and intended usages with a variety of materials including hairy organic silicone forms that I manufacture using methods from the reborn doll industry- a meditation on the fraught relationship between modernism and corporeality, the contemporary female experience, and a push towards the surreal and uncanny. References to the Salton Sea (California’s largest lake, an accidental and booming vacation oasis in the 50s, and now an environmental disaster) throughout my work serve as a metaphor for the inevitable, necessary, and sometimes beautiful decay of enigmatic American myths.

Do current events, local or global, affect your work and what you are focused on?
Art has always been a catalyst for social change, and some have said that ideological shifts in art anticipate those in other disciplines. Works that lack criticality or that don’t seek to expand the consciousness of viewers are boring to me. I am not interested in making art that isn’t socially engaged in some way- either quietly or loudly. Most of my work is a direct response to events in US history over the last century and their implications for contemporary lived experience.

Cesar A. Cruz, the Mexican poet and human rights activist said, “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” I have always imagined Cruz’ statement to mean that art should inspire agency for the oppressed and awaken the privileged to their involvement in oppression. This central role of art is even more pressing today.

Do you have any events or exhibitions coming up? Where would one go to see more of your work? How can people support you and your artwork?
I have a two-person exhibition coming up at LAUNCH LA in March. Otherwise, my website or IG are great places to connect and hear about upcoming events.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.elizabethfolk.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/elizabethfrancesfolk/

Image Credit:
Elizabeth Folk

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