ELIZABETH ORR

The No Name Lightbulb solo exhibition  Derosia, New York, NY January 6–February 18, 2023

The state of the lights in a room constitute a mode—ON and OFF. If your room is like our room you can switch it ON and OFF. - Elizabeth Orr, This Room, HD video, 2023

Elizabeth Orr’s sculpture recontextualizes signature features of our built environment, heightening their formal properties for nuanced consideration. In her third exhibition with Derosia, The No Name Lightbulb, Orr expands her architectural references and sculptural vocabulary, further probing elements of design that are rendered invisible by their familiarity.

Orr’s sculpture enacts a tension between object and painting, mass-produced and manmade, aligning with traditions in minimalist sculpture yet employing new strategies. Orr’s architectural sculptures subtly shift within repetition and order, generating an inherent kinetic language. Orr uses an orbital sander to finish her exposed aluminum surfaces, and parallels this circular, atmospheric technique in her painted panels with a French wash, referring to decorative interior painting and addressing two poles of design: construction and decor. Her color choices derive from sources such as video production and interior wall paint.

The sculptures, mounted on walls, ostensibly preclude their viewing in the round. Yet through the deployment of slats and shutters, Orr opens the works to another mode of three-dimensional viewing, rupturing and exposing an otherwise concealed verso to our perception. The sculptures adhere to internal specifications to ensure their modality, insinuating regularity while inventing within their own form. The painted panels undulate and pause, their composition richly rhythmic rather than rotely repetitive.

Orr also introduces the readymade to her practice with wall plates, strategically installed to align more closely with codes of construction than museological conventions. Outlet covers proliferate across the gallery space, divorced from function and emphasizing form. With this gesture, Orr threads together the guiding logic of her installation, the lineage of minimalist sculpture, and the reciprocity of interior design standards and extrinsic systems. Minimalist sculpture descends from the reductive trend of the readymade, a fact underscored by the morphological similarities in Orr’s examples of each. Rectangular and wall bound, her sculpture and readymades align as framing devices, portals, to the amorphic natural and manmade conditions that supplement interior design. Sunlight, views, methods of display, electricity, internet, are all indexed by the work in The No Name Lightbulb, yet not directly proffered. In subverting this expectation, Orr casts into relief the infinitude we funnel, selectively, into our daily surroundings.

Single-Use Account 1708 Gallery, Richmond, Virginia  Opening Reception: Friday, May 6, 2022, 5 – 9 pm Documentation

1708 Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Single-Use Account by Elizabeth Orr. Central to the exhibition is an advertisement, written and produced by the artist and presented at 1708 as a multi-channel video and sculptural installation. Through the seductive visual language of luxury branding, this advertisement promotes a lifestyle that stridently values sustainability. The narrative imagines a society that objects to single-use containers, and is appalled by their blatant use as marketing tools. As an advertisement, the work analyzes capitalist endeavors that exploit and create revenue connected to ongoing, global environmental disasters. Single-Use Account elaborates on the range of emotions and actions over time when we are faced with choices that define our stance on sustainability.

Single-Use Account challenges distinctions between capitalist production (the camera operator) and the consumer (the actor). The shadow of a steadicam rig tracking the main character symbolizes the dynamic position of the prosumer (production by consumer) within our current neoliberal economy. In prosumer culture, the objectification of lifestyles (from which a brand’s main financial value is extracted) relies on the collective creation of content and endless aspirations to emulate and embody a brand’s image and ideals. This cycle of production and consumption of desire can shift ideologies and in  this way, Orr’s advertisement approaches the limits between promotion and propaganda. However contradictory it may be to a lifestyle brand’s au courant, eco-friendly ethos, the over production and consumption of physical products remains a reality that has a direct impact on the health of the planet. A single-use cup emblazoned with a logo next to its green stamp of recyclability is a prime example of this dissonance between intention and action. The advertisement usurps prosumer logic to signal what collective action against the habits and conveniences of single-use containers could look like in the future.

Orr has designed components of the installation to be modular and reusable. In doing so she is ensuring that its future presentation, shipping, and use is sustainable. Foldable screens and loaned and refurbished projectors are placed on telescopic, collapsible stands. Sandbags weigh the entire installation to the floor as a jarring reference to the realities of climate change and the short link between single-use containers, reliance on non-renewable energy, and natural disasters. These utilitarian choices are also in-part a self-reflection. The artist and 1708 are fully aware of how contemporary art exhibitions rely on processes that are inherently wasteful, complicit in the use of disposable materials, and ultimately contributing to pollution in its many forms. In Single-Use Account Orr pairs the cool, seductive visuals of her advertisement with a sober, practical display apparatus to reveal a myriad of touchpoints between free markets, culture, excess, and activism.  

Spirits in Rotations 2020 25" H x 15" W x 3" D Aluminum, beet, wood, plexiglass

Reliable 25" H x 7" W x 5" D Aluminum, tumeric, wood, bronze glass

What You’ve Been Meaning to Say 25" H x 22" W x 2" D Aluminum, tumeric, wood, bronze glass

Slight Unseen Changes 25" H x 11" W x 4" D Aluminum, beet, wood, tinted glass

Turning Familiar 38" H x 11" W x 2" D Aluminum, turmeric, wood, glass

Mazes (2020) Excerpt, HD video, 02:48mins Elizabeth Orr, 2020  Featuring: Charlotte Curtis

Mazes (2020) is Elizabeth Orr’s current video project. Mazes proposes that the maze is a way to visualize the process of psychoanalysis- how the experience and construction of mazes mirror the relationship in psychoanalysis between truth, and the imaginary. Not as oppositional but rather the means by which it operates.

… I ask a man to the left of me: “Do the knees always sit in red concrete?“ … the man replies: “In the old days, the klenadek always put in the mortar of milled bones mixed with blood. From human bones, human blood. You know, without blood binding, the arch would not hold. We currently use animal blood. ”(Ursula Le Guin: Left Hand of Darkness)  

Elizabeth Orr bodega Our Hallway Is Surrounded September 10–October 15 Opening September 10, 6–8pm

Elizabeth Orr circles the idea of the anti-phenomenological in relation to a new body of work that uses motifs of the imagined American house and the game of chess to raise the issue of strategic amorality. The claim of phenomenology—one shared with minimalism—is that movement through, over, under, and around objects accomplishes something by virtue of spatial juxtaposition alone and therefore influences perception.   Through a resolutely obscure layering of imagery and tinted glass, Orr’s work reveals nothing but the mechanism of revelation itself. Orr suggests that information—revealed constantly, fluidly, scrolling and pushed—produces its own screen in the name of visibility. The works recognize and reject this politics of clarity, visibility, and frictionless revelation. Chess originated as game modeled on military forces. It is a game of total information: players have at their disposal all the information concerning their opponents’ positions. It is a game of pure strategy that does not, as the Queen in Orr’s video suggests, tolerate affective or moral attachments. Yet total information makes it a bad metaphor for anything, including the military arms that it represents. In the 19th century, Kriegsspiel (“war game”) was invented as a system for training German and Prussian army officers. It is a variation on chess where players cannot see their opponents’ moves.