Elizabeth Bradford: Time + Terrain

Image Credit: Elizabeth Bradford. Stream Near Harpers Creek, 2014. Acrylic on canvas. 30 x 48 inches. Courtesy the artist.

August 13 - November 19, 2016

Elizabeth Bradford gleans images from the rural landscape surrounding her family’s ancestral farm in northern Mecklenburg County, where she lives. The expanded scope of her artwork includes impressions of countries she explores, as well as the wilderness where she kayaks, hikes, and camps. Bradford constructs complex compositions, utilizing precise layers of color and dynamic mark-making to evoke form, light, and shadow. Bradford compares her paintings to the tessera in a mosaic or the pixels of a photograph, fracturing the image into its component parts, which then coalesce into a whole. Her paintings invite contemplation of the familiar and the lovely within a natural setting, but the uncanny of the unknown and the mysterious also beckon. “Elizabeth Bradford: Time + Terrain” invites the viewer to study the natural world, to explore it deeply. The exhibition includes 40 paintings of various scale—some large and encompassing, and others that are more intimately scaled, all reflecting her naturalist’s sensibilities. Revealing her recent investigations with sites in the Southeast, several paintings are borrowed from museums within North Carolina, where her paintings have been selected for permanent collections. “Time + Terrain” explores, in part, the historical continuum of the region’s natural environment serving as an essential source of inspiration.

This exhibition is presented by Wells Fargo Private Bank and curated by Carla Hanza.