NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND

MICHELMAN MAKES SPACE

Marguerite Serkin

It is not often that the creative output of an artist matches her intellectual capacities. For Elizabeth Michelman, there is context and conceptual reasoning behind her creative choices as an artist and in exhibition design. She is able to convey the impetus behind her multi-faceted implementation through words and visual cues within the works themselves.

Michelman, a longtime Artscope contributor, is notably versatile in her use of multimedia genres. Her artistic output as sculptor, installation artist, writer, and videographer and her two-dimensional constructs are linked under the aegis of Michelman’s clearly defined yet evolving aesthetic. The artist is able to convey tone and form through discreet choices in color and a deceptively whimsical placement of content which belies a strong, implied spatial understanding.

Her “Notes from Underground” exhibition, showing at the Castleton Downtown Gallery in Rutland, Vermont from May 13 through June 24, continues a rich tradition of site-specific exhibitions featuring Michelman’s work. The gallery inhabits a series of underground rooms with
rock-hewn walls, inviting adaptive use of curatorial discernment.

“This gallery has a progression of underground rooms demanding quite different treatments,” Michelman observed. “I’m interested in the scale, lighting, and connective spaces, how they affect interpretation of the works. The discipline is the space.” She continued, “The low ceilings, funny niches, stone walls and pipes, doors, boxes, registers and switch boxes are all features I choose to acknowledge rather than work around. They draw me in to solve the problem of how to fit my visual ideas and thematic concerns with the environment.”

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