ELIZABETH SHER: MARK MY WORDS
October 21st, 2022 – November 26th, 2022
Elizabeth Sher explores the spiritual nature of words in her latest body of work Mark My Words. These hand-drawn and neon pieces are Sher’s response to the inundation of words that infiltrate her waking and sleeping mind. Using bamboo pen and jewel-toned ink on handmade paper, Sher creates poetic strings of magical words in phrases that push back against the infiltration. “Who stole my dream”, one drawing asks? Employing belligerence and wit, she limns a favorite playground retort: “Says Who”. Many of her pieces get right to the sarcastic point: “No Kidding”, “Who Knew”, “So You Say”.
Sher focuses on repetition, writing, and rewriting phrases, composing them into refrains that resist and disarm: “Hold On”, “I Am Worthy”. Drawings shimmer with ambiguity: “Help You Help Me Help You Help Me”, “Enough Is Enough Enough Is Not Enough”. Sher lets her words possess her physical body and through the ritual of handwriting she transforms them into art.
Sher’s drawing style is expressionistic; she forms upstanding capital letters without spaces and the words dissolve into letters and forms that may take some deciphering. Ink runs and blots into the folds of the highly textured paper, obscuring an easy reading. Sher’s hand-written script blocks the smooth digital communication and fast circulation of information that accelerates our lives beyond meaning and agency. Through art, she makes her prescription to us very clear: “Speak Up Speak Up”.
(Above excerpted from essay by Kathleen King)
Selected Works
Elizabeth Sher
Bay Area artist and filmmaker, Elizabeth Sher is Professor Emeritus of Art at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco where she taught painting and media arts. Currently working in video, artist books, digital mixed media on canvas, paper, and metal, Sher passes freely between static and moving images, paint and pixels, traditional and new media. She mixes these with a strong basis of formal discourse and a quirky sense of popular culture blended with insightful honesty and humor. Career highlights include her work being widely collected including SFMOMA and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum of California; her films have been broadcast on PBS and internationally including “PENNY: Champion of the Marginalized” Film (writer, director, editor) and “Rituals of Remembrance: Exploring the Art of Mourning” (co-director and producer); exhibits such as “Good Coffee, Bad News” solo Show at Mercury 20 Gallery in 2024 and “Ten Years of Artist Books” curated by Donna Seager at the Brooklyn Central Library; an artist residency at Studi D’arte Nel Castelio, Aragonese, Castle, BAU Institute in Otranto, Italy; and as a featured artist at the Bioneer International Conference in 2022.