NYAB Event - Elizabeth Duffy “Apartment 2B”

Elizabeth Duffy “Apartment 2B”

dm contemporary NYC

This event has ended.

dm contemporary NYC presents a simultaneous exhibition featuring the work and the environment created by a multidisciplinary artist Elizabeth Duffy, entitled Apartment 2B.

Apartment 2B is an installation in which Elizabeth Duffy transforms the main gallery space into a domestic environment that is realistic and almost credible, until one takes a closer look only to realize that the patterns throughout the space seem strangely familiar - they are the same patterns found lining security envelopes that bills get mailed in to keep sensitive information protected and private. Finding inspiration in a disposable material, that is quickly becoming a relic of the past thanks to email, Duffy collects, draws, scans, prints, and embroiders, to reproduce a variety of data protection patterns on a vast range of materials and objects. Using these meticulously crafted and highly patterned creations, in an amplified fashion to cover the walls, the furniture, and every object in this otherwise charming modernist apartment, Duffy manages to create a feeling of unease, and puzzlement. In an evasive and subtle manner, Duffy’s apartment 2B - playfully titled as a reference to the fact that dm contemporary gallery actually occupies flat 2B on the second floor of a residential building - blurs the boundaries between real and unreal, private and public, and surrounds us with hints that raise questions ‘enveloping’ every aspect of contemporary life, including concepts of domestic comforts and stability at a time of exponential change, and concepts of security and privacy in a digital age - especially as details of electronic surveillance dominate today’s news.

Elizabeth Duffy lives and works in Providence, RI, Acworth, NH and Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA from CUNY Brooklyn College and studied art at the New York Studio School, Hunter College and Rutgers College. Her work has been widely exhibited at venues such as the Drawing Center, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, White Columns, and The Islip Museum. Residencies include: the Bogliasco Foundation/Liguria Center for the Arts and Humanities (Italy), the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and Ragdale. She received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, and in 2013, she was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities grant. Duffy’s work is in the collections in numerous public and private collections. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art News, Art on Paper, the Boston Globe, the Village Voice, and many other publications. She currently teaches Art at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island.