Elizabeth Krieter

All Over the Place

I have this weird thing about windows. I don’t think I noticed it until it was pointed out to me, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about how much I gravitate toward them. In a window, the viewer is almost always on the outside looking in (unless they are on the inside looking out), and there is always an outside even if the outside is not actually outside, and there is always an inside even if the inside is not actually inside, and the inside is always, in some way, more intimate and private and expressive than the outside. Also inherently implied by the window is that it is not meant to be breached (though “not meant to” does not mean “impossible”), and by looking through the window, the viewer generally has no intention of entering the intimate space from which they are excluded. A window is not a threshold. It is not inviting.

A window can be anything, if you think about it. Anything that can be looked into or looked through. I can be a window, if I rework a few walls. I think, in this way, All Over the Place is a little bit of a window. It is meant to give the viewer a glimpse inside of me, and maybe they see themselves reflected in the pane (pain?), but they are not included in the narrative. They are outside and I am inside.

I wanted to emphasize process, self doubt, insecurity, an eternal timidity, and my general state of scatter-brained-ness that I walk around with in my daily life: my inside. The world is scary, and I have always struggled with figuring out what I want out of life while trying to navigate everything it throws at me. It seemed only right to utilize the inherent repetition in the medium of printmaking to emphasize my repetitive streams of thought; the biggest and most common being What Are You Doing?, which pops up again and again across the entire installation.

Process is inextricable from a final result, and as I’ve learned through my experiences as an artist (and especially through my experience in printmaking) the level of care and patience with which you treat your process is going to make or break your piece. This is my process, my inside, my learning, my experimentation, my loneliness, my intimacy and privacy and expression. This is where I was and where I’ve been and where I’m going and where I haven’t been but wish I had and where I have been but wish I hadn’t: all over the place.

Contact

@liz.kri