Eliza Griffiths is a Canadian painter whose work involves the creation of invented characters in psychologically fraught pictorial tableaux. Favourite themes include sexuality and gender, identity, and the complexity of desire. Her paintings have been shown extensively across Canada in both solo and group exhibitions, as well as in the US, UK, and in Spain. Griffiths currently lives in Montreal and teaches painting at Concordia University.


Statement

My artistic practice is based on the creation of invented characters who performdistilled psychological, social, and experiential narratives in painting tableaux. The additive and subtractive process of painting allows me to build figures who convey the tension of a desired communication with the viewer and with each other, expressing themes of identity confusion, gender, sexuality, intimacy and power. Over the past number of years I have worked in thematic series, beginning each with a conceptual framework and then allowing the layered painting processes to determine the eventual form and content of the work.Bodies of work include multi-media, painting-based installation Peep: Beyond the Eye of the Beholder which addressed issues of power dynamics in the possessive gaze; Stories of Girls which examined female adolescent socio-psycho-sexual identity; Psycho-Dramas in Paint;and the open-ended Optimistic Dysfunction series. Ongoing in my work has been the constructed `Frankensteinian’ figure as the central agent of communication, and desire as the central motif. Recent work has elaborated these explorations into issues of social dynamics and functioning, and the need for meaningful experience and connections.