Pathways

Project Pathways is a curatorial initiative within the Elisabeth Foundation for the Arts Open Studios program that highlights the creative processes behind contemporary artistic practice. Focusing on works in development as well as completed projects, it offers visitors insight into the research, experimentation, and critical thinking that shape each artist’s journey.

Bringing together a diverse group of resident artists, the project traces connections between individual practices while emphasizing the unique approaches, materials, and ideas that inform their work. Through curated presentations and studio engagement, Project Pathways invites audiences to explore how artistic concepts evolve over time.

By foregrounding process and dialogue, the initiative transforms the studio visit into an opportunity for deeper understanding and exchange, revealing the many pathways through which contemporary art is imagined, developed, and shared.

History is often presented as fixed and authoritative, yet it is built through acts of selection, omission, and interpretation. The artists in this pathway approach memory as an active, contested terrain, uncovering narratives that have been forgotten, displaced, marginalized, or deliberately erased. Working across photography, installation, video, performance, painting, collage, and research-based practices, they engage archives both personal and institutional, drawing attention to the gaps between lived experience and official record. Family histories, migration, exile, labor, colonial legacies, political violence, and collective remembrance emerge as recurring concerns. Rather than treating the archive as a repository of stable facts, these artists reveal it as a site of negotiation—one shaped by power, absence, and desire. Through acts of recovery, speculation, reconstruction, and reimagining, they create counter-histories that challenge dominant narratives and expand our understanding of how the past continues to shape the present.

Modern life is often shaped by systems of logic, efficiency, and empirical knowledge, yet many artists continue to explore forms of understanding rooted in intuition, ritual, mythology, and spiritual experience. The artists in this pathway engage with symbolic worlds that exist alongside—or beyond—the rational, drawing from folklore, ancestral traditions, cosmologies, and personal belief systems. Working across painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and interdisciplinary practices, they investigate transformation as both a material and psychological process.

Ritual gestures, mythic narratives, acts of healing, and encounters with the unseen become ways of navigating questions of identity, memory, mortality, and connection. Rather than presenting spirituality as fixed doctrine, these artists approach it as a fluid space of inquiry and imagination, where ancient knowledge and contemporary experience intersect. Through acts of invocation, reflection, and reinvention, they create works that invite viewers to consider alternative ways of perceiving the world and their place within it.