Elisabeth Condon at Hollywood Art and Culture Center

Elisabeth Condon: Seven Seas at Hollywood Art and Culture Center

In her painting and drawing exhibition, Seven Seas at Hollywood Art and Culture Center, Elisabeth Condon introduces the 1980s Los Angeles nightclub scene as a metaphor for personal and social transformation. The Tampa and Brooklyn-based artist approaches this landscape as a repository for individual and shared memories, associations, and cultural experiences.

Named after an early 1980s Polynesian-themed bar in L.A., The Seven Seas is comprised of 16 vellum drawings, two scroll paintings, and other discrete paintings that merge the architecture, decor, fashion, and palette of the city’s nightclubs from 1974 to 1981. Glitter, New Wave, and Punk aesthetics culled from personal memories and media images inform these works.

Two scroll-like paintings face each other on the long walls, flanked by paintings on either end of the gallery. The paintings incorporate spray-painted black drywall, stucco, foil, opalescent color, and glitter to mark passages between points of focus while conjuring the outrageous look of clubs, such as Rodney Bingenheimer’s legendary English Disco in Los Angeles circa 1974.

Elisabeth Condon is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist & Sculptors Grant for 2018, the New York PULSE Prize and a New York Studio School Mercedes Matter Award for 2015, a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant for 2007, a Florida Individual Artist Grant for 2008, and numerous research grants from the University of South Florida, where she held tenure from 2003 to 2014. Condon’s previous artist residencies include the Montello, UCross, and Morris Graves Foundations, Carizozo Colony, Wave Hill Winter Workspace Program, Swatch Art Peace Hotel Shanghai, Fountainhead, National Parks Residencies at Grand Canyon, Florida Everglades, and Yaddo. Her work is held in the collections of Perez Art Museum Miami, Tampa Museum of Art, United States Embassy Beijing, and JP Morgan Chase, and has been featured in numerous online and print publications including Hyperallergic, artcritical, Artnews, Arts + Antiques, New York Observer, and the Miami Herald. Condon lives and works in New York.