Lookout

Elizabeth Flood

April 19th - July 20th, 2024

Storage
52 Walker Street
4th Floor
Tribeca, New York 10013

Storage is excited to present Lookout, Elizabeth Flood’s debut solo exhibition in New York City. The show features a selection of oil paintings and ink drawings made in the last four years.

Flood's monumental multi-canvas oil paintings compile different vantage points and elevations around a particular site. Hiking out with her materials, Flood works on one canvas at a time, later joining them together in her studio. Each canvas is made at the same site, often over many months, accumulating layers of weather, seasonal shifts, and emotions.

• Events

  Artist Talk
  1:30-3:30pm
  Friday, May 3rd

  Storage
  52 Walker Street
  4th Floor
  Tribeca, New York 10013

  Join us for a conversation between Elizabeth Flood and Josephine Halvorson on ideas surrounding plein air landscape painting, working from observation, and expression in painting.

  Opening Reception
  6-8pm
  Friday, April 19th

• Press Release

  Taking place outdoors in the elements, Flood’s practice is physical and watchful. She excavates strata of emotion, history, and movement embedded in the landscape in her responsive, gestural approach. As an artist, Flood feels and processes the world around her, looking to cycles of trauma and endurance in the American Landscape through depictions of the Atlantic Ocean and dunes in Provincetown, Massachusetts; The Hudson River; Civil War Battlefields in Chancellorsville, Virginia and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; and the Mojave Desert. These works span four years—a national election cycle—recording changes of weather, light, and topography through physical endurance and expression of painting.

  Lookout is an expression of warning, someone who keeps watch, and a place from which to see things coming. Flood’s work embodies these multiple definitions. She describes her practice as one of forecasting, communing, and vigilance. She looks to scars of impact and extraction embedded in the land to build resilience, and keep watch over a climate and country in crisis. For example, Battlefield (Chancellorsville, Summer), looks to traumas of war and loss buried in the soil, and to the persistent growth of surrounding plant life. Undulating ravines and trenches carve through the paintings’ relief-like surface. Flood looks to the land as collaborator and guide, incorporating grasses and sticks from the battlefield into the humid greens of the surrounding foliage. As a deeply divided America approaches another presidential election, weaponization of ideologies surrounding the Civil War is ever present. These paintings instead are a call to learn from what the land has witnessed, and watch out for danger on the horizon.

  Her monumental multi-canvas oil paintings compile different vantage points and elevations around a particular site. Hiking out with her materials, Flood works on one canvas at a time, later joining them together in her studio. Each canvas is made at the same site, often over many months, accumulating layers of weather, seasonal shifts, and emotions. Dunes, an immersive and atmospheric six canvas oil painting, charts the landscape’s changing terrain from February through July of 2023. Sweeping gestures of violet shadows echo the speed and violence of the wind. Airborn sand abrades the surface of the paintings, carving out a site of impact. Individually, each canvas is spatially logical, but as a whole, sky and ground, near and far become one in the same. Flood looks to Diego Rivera’s massive history frescoes, Joan Mitchell’s arboreal abstractions, and Sally Mann’s haunting photographs of the American South. Her cyclical compilations of canvases foreground a turbulent, experiential, and vital landscape.

  Single canvas “spiral paintings” pivot around a central locus, mapping cycles of erosion and burial, night and day, and life and death in the natural world. The topography and motion of the site dictate each vantage point’s gestural contours. As the time of day changes, the entire painting is rotated, and new horizons emerge. Nightwatch (Atlantic Ocean) weaves together phases of twilight, from dusk to dawn. Inky blacks and indigos smear with sandy grit. Wading her way through the disorienting dark, Flood grasps for beacons, searching for signals in the lights of passing boats and stars. Like the nearby lighthouses, which once kept watch for shipwrecks, these works keep vigil over a turbulent, vital, and vulnerable ocean—and the artist herself.

  In her black and white ink drawings, Flood traces the movement and terrain around her. These drawings are like cross sections of her embodied paintings, each a watchful representation of the landscape as it exists today. Collectively, the works in Lookout are spaces of communing, warning, and expression.

• About Elizabeth Flood

  Flood lives and works in Beacon, NY and is originally from Virginia. She earned her MFA in Painting from Boston University, her BA in History and Religious Studies from the University of Virginia, and studied at the Mt. Gretna School Of Art. In 2019, Flood was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and was an artist-in-residence at the Studios at MASS MoCA. She was awarded two Visual Arts Fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in 2021 and 2022. Flood is the recipient of several grants and awards including the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant which helped fund this exhibition, the Real Art Award, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Graduate Fellowship, and the Boston University John Walker Alumni Award. She currently teaches painting at Purchase College.

Press Release (Cycle VIII)

Aristotle Forrester, Kathryn Goshorn, Louisa Owen, Marcus Leslie Singleton, Wen Liu, Sebastian Burger, Elizabeth Flood, & Michiko Itatani

March 16th - April 13th, 2024

Storage
52 Walker Street
4th Floor
Tribeca, New York 10013

Storage is pleased to announce Press Release (Cycle VIII), presenting artists Aristotle Forrester, Kathryn Goshorn, Louisa Owen, Marcus Leslie Singleton, Wen Liu, Sebastian Burger, Elizabeth Flood, and Michiko Itatani. This exhibition is held in extension of the gallery’s ongoing, rotational exhibition survey, Press Release (2022-present), featuring international and overlooked artists.

• Events

  Opening Reception
  6-8pm
  Friday, August 2nd

  Storage Tribeca
  52 Walker St, 4th Fl, New York, NY 10013

• Aristotle Forrester

  Aristotle Forrester explores personal narratives of loss, mythologies, and of the Black experience to ground his work within the expanding field of contemporary abstract painting. Extending lines of inquiry that originate in the modalities of mid-century artists including Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell, Forrester develops upon the idea of a figurative landscape with gestural, loaded brushstrokes to release an expressive quality upon his thick, luscious canvases.

• Kathryn Goshorn

  Kathryn Goshorn builds images in depiction of the human condition, the purpose of life and how behavior can affect its quality. Goshorn contemplates a duty to understand the space we take up and our influence as we move through the world and interact, leaving those echoes of action, or cause and effect, where the effect is irreparable and one is left to speculate about the cause.

• Louisa Owen

  Louisa Owen’s works posit paper as a membrane material, able to soak and absorb the atmosphere into itself. Reminiscent of the bodily forms and orifices found in Lee Bontecou’s wall sculptures or recent paper works by Lynda Benglis, Owens develops abstracted, organic structures simultaneously suggestive of a cave or a spinal column. Emphasizing durability and the architecture of such a frame in place to support the facilities of the body, Owen’s sculptures provide chambers and inlets for holding expressions of spirituality, meditation, loss, and stasis.

• Marcus Leslie Singleton

  Marcus Leslie Singleton is a Seattle born artist celebrated for his distinctive figurative paintings that deftly intertwine personal observations with broader societal themes. Singleton’s process demands a delicate balance of interpretation and recollection. Through natural, carefree, and playful brush strokes, his work offers meditations on broader issues of race, representation and the historical significance of everyday moments. Using spontaneity, scale, and expressive placement of color, Singleton’s paintings offer a jovial yet serious perspective that is both poignant and bold.

• Wen Liu

  Wen Liu’s sculptures address loss and abandonment through the modification and assembly of found materials. She uses reclaimed domestic objects to build up her sense of belonging and security. Sculptural reinvestment and temporal shift of traces from past to present imply narratives of absence and presence as well as alienation and comfort. Liu ‘s work balances between the contiuums of temporality and permanence, seeking to address the disparities between public recollection and private memory.

• Michiko Itatani

  Michiko Itatani (b. 1948, Osaka, Japan) is a Chicago-based painter. Itatani studied literature and philosophy in her youth before relocating to the US in the 1970's, where she studied visual art at the School of Art Institute of Chicago. She has received the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Marie Sharp Walsh New York Studio Grant and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship among others. She was selected by the Women’s Caucus for a Lifetime Achievement Award 2020.

Press Release (Cycle I)

Nate Lewis, Elizabeth Flood, Morgan Canavan, Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, Carlos Martiel, Lyndon Barrois Jr, & Kim Hoeckele

September 9th, 2022 - February 1st, 2023

Storage
52 Walker Street
4th Floor
Tribeca, New York 10013

Press Release, the inaugural exhibition at our new 52 Walker Street location explores how feelings of pressure and tension –be they physical, social, or emotional– have become unsustainable and what new dimensions of release –in protest, in violence, in loving acts, and mutual care– have been created in response to the relationship between the power of pressure and the pressure of media and art production at large.

Historically, we traced the term “press” as a metonym for the media following the invention of the printing press, recalling its modern power with two of its actions and their implicit authority: Press as the embedded physicality in the act of pressing, and Release as containing an implicated response of resistance to applied pressure.

Storage will have an "Open Studio" model for group exhibitions, allowing shows to evolve and exhibit works by incoming artists on a rotating basis during the duration of each presentation. Press Release opens with works by Nate Lewis, Elizabeth Flood, Morgan Canavan, Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, Carlos Martiel, Lyndon Barrois Jr, and Kim Hoeckele.

• Events

  Opening Reception
  6-8pm
  Friday, September 9th, 2022