Elizabeth Dimitroff
“Afterimage”
New York, 245 Tenth Avenue
Elizabeth Dimitroff’s (b. 1995; Chicago, IL) work examines the spaces between memory and truth, anchoring figurative paintings in unnamable emotional sensations that subvert legibility in favor of an immersive dedication to mood. Inspired by cyclical time and shared memories, Dimitroff favors an openness to speculation rather than concrete narrative, pursuing the impressions of memory rather than a perfect reconstruction. In the artist’s work, the lost nature of past events is a point of connection with viewers — audiences are welcomed into her luminous paintings, only to find a softly glowing retelling of an original. An afterimage, like a memory, loses shape and fades following initial exposure, which the artist parallels in the unravelling narrative threads of her work. Open-ended in nature, her work thus allows for parallel reads and associations
AM, 2023 Oil on Linen 48" x 60 3/16" (122 x 153 cm)
The paintings in Afterimage are the result of Dimitroff’s intuitive process, in which the artist layers and blends images from a deep personal archive to create liminal environments, simultaneously sentimental and anonymous. Her spaces are inhabited by figures that bridge the uncanny and the approachable, rendered in soft, warm tones within half-emptied environments. These beings are present, but not fully real, made apparent in their closed or absent eyes. Unable to return their viewers’ gaze, these subjects leave audiences free to look and speculate, and to engage the work’s open-ended narratives. A projection-based form of viewership emerges, and stories appear in ways not unlike methods born of the classic Rorschach test, revealing as much about their viewers as they do their hidden content.
Dimitroff’s warm, inviting palette portrays an array of comforting spaces, forming empty beaches, homelike corners, and fragments of furniture. Further study, though, reveals anomalies within each scene, as details are blurred or absent, or identical figures appear more than once. The artist’s work posits that the apparent truth of memory is, in fact, constructed. Time is indelible in its passing, and though a figment left behind may still be present, it has a different, spectral life, animated by rules outside the physical realm.
YELLOW ROOM, 2023 Oil on Linen 43 3/8" x 51 1/4" (110 x 130 cm)
Included in the exhibition is 8AM, a figurative painting that revels in the silence of a still life. Curled on a bench, a figure shies away from a beam of sunlight, which plays in shadows and reflects through to the back of the composition. Shielding their eyeless face, the subject’s refusal of the light mirrors Dimitroff’s concealment of identity, their particulars hidden from the viewer as though the sunlight might reveal this deeper truth. Despite their hiding, the morning sun illuminates muted, radiant colors all around them, enveloping the work in a wash of warmth and comfort. The sensation of the escalating light becomes the central emotive quality as the curled figure holds still, their twisted pose held calm.
Initially intended to be a self-portrait, 8AM shifted in identity, ultimately changing from a legible self-image into a ghostly figure and gaining a new life as a presence of its own. Apparitions like these are present throughout Afterimage, animating the likenesses of friends, relatives, and strangers to the artist alike. Ambiguating her relationships to these figures, Dimitroff distills her emotive connection to each scene to the level of sensation. These works draw their power from these points of divergence, which create spaces the viewer fills with their own associations.
