Photo courtesy of Jackie Hoving
ARTIST STATEMENT
Elise Kaufman–art statement
I express fragility and absenceusing landscape,architecture and figurative surrogates,using photography and photo-based processes. This, in concert with embracing substrate and surfaces of conveys presence through absence.My work is rooted in the relationship between touch and the camera lens. It is not a passive dialogue: it is an articulation of contemporary conversations rooted in image making modalities and rests in a space in which description is not always decorative.In referencing relationships to architecture and intimate spaces impressionistically, I express impermanence and indeterminacy as crucial elements towards describing the transcendent and the sublime.
ABOUT
​Elise Kaufman received her MFA from Queens College and her BFA from Pratt Institute. Her work has been exhibited in the United States as well as in Ireland, France, Spain and Italy. Venues include the Albright-Knox Gallery, the Arkansas Art Center, ArtSpace Gallery (New Haven), the Brooklyn Museum, the Hillwood Art Museum, the Kentler International Drawing Space, the Mills Gallery (Boston Center for the Arts), the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, and the Weatherspoon Art Gallery. Her work is included in numerous public and private collections including the Arkansas Art Center, the Ballinglen Art Museum, the Birmingham Art Museum, the Boise Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Cedar Rapids Museum, the Delaware Art Museum, the Fogg Art Museum (Harvard University Museums), and the Werner H. and Sally-Ann Kramarsky Collection.
She has been a repeat Fellow at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation (Ireland), the Vermont Studio Center and at the Cow House Studios (Ireland).
Kaufman is a Professor of Art at the Pratt Institute and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts