EFA STUDIO PROGRAM: Member Artists
Elizabeth Colomba
As a figurative painter I employ the technical strategies of academic painting in order to interrupt the canon and appropriate its tropes. Inserting’ Black people into history of Western art is not enough, black bodies are present but relegated as invisible subjects while carrying the burden of history. I make them visible, unload the baggage they are usually carrying, and generate a space to tell a different tale. Creating images which challenges our learned perception and unconscious reactions, helps us to re-evaluate what we know. The interpretation of stories taking place at instances of anticipation or aftermath, thereby holding a present that has not-yet happened and not-yet passed, ensues into the imaginary meeting of two peoples, a reconciliation of ethnic groups through art, myths, religious iconography, folklore .
The problem is not the genesis of our own ideas but the process by which we can attach an idea to the words of others . Works of art create their own temporality: they form their own method in which they transcend time. By correcting the erasure of the Other I re-define not only how Black people have been conditioned to exist, but also how Black people have been conditioned to reflect upon themselves. Supplanting traditional subjects attributed to historical themes in Western art by referencing my own Martinican heritage and history instead, I create a new language to include West Indian, French and black narratives.
