M+B is pleased to announce More Than the Moment, an online presentation of works on paper by Elizabeth Shull. The show will be available online from January 14 – February 4, 2022.

Elizabeth Shull is a translator, traversing the expanse between collective experience and personal loss, collapsing vast catalogs of pure feeling into poetically sparse images. The works in More Than the Moment began as a response to the Woolsey Fire, which leveled huge swaths of the Southern California landscape Shull calls home. While the majority of Shull’s work does not represent the fires specifically, each piece harbors a certain fascination with memory and documentation. Through the use of small dimensions, Shull funnels her work into an immediate and emotionally saturated register – these are not slowly accreted, sprawling meditations on a single event, but rather expressive imprints of a fleeting experience, of a moment so pregnant with energy as to demand rapid capture. They begin as inward facing explorations of Shull’s subjective relationship to the natural world around her, small moments of lost time slipping through the flow of history. At the same time, they converse with a universal human condition, mapping scenes which are less vehicles for social commentary and more so symbols of a collective life passing through the turbulence of history. Like any good translation, Shull’s drawings do not offer definitive versions of an event, but rather suggest open-ended impressions of a universal language of feeling and memory.

Natural landscapes weigh heavy upon Shull’s work. Flora and fauna, sun glazed earth and placid sea flow into one another. Her works are animated by color palettes which are not realistic, in the strict sense, but rather affectively tinged, prisms into the wonder Shull experiences while exploring her surroundings. Human figures materialize as negative space, dark redactions of uncolored paper bestowed with the representational freedom to be both anyone and everyone. Shull’s drawings are not objective documents. They correspond neither to photographic reference nor to art historical convention. Instead, they subsume real events into the logic of Shull’s ever-shifting, emotive relationship to the world, becoming, over time, a more real document of her experience than the one stored in her memory itself. In this sense, Shull’s work takes on an almost literary quality, communing with the great reporters of memory and memory lost – like W. G. Sebald’s characters, for instance, who flit through countless photographs and empty towns searching for ways to account for a forgotten time, Shull’s drawings do not simply honor the past, but rather speak to the currently living. The affective intensity of Shull’s drawings changes in relation to the viewer’s personal biography, each drawing taking on a distinct weight according to the lived memory of its beholder. Shull’s drawings discover their expressive power through those personal experiences which cannot be known by another, while simultaneously linking the personal memories of all who encounter them together, as if each engagement with her work were a sparkling dot tacked on to a strand of Christmas lights called “the universal language of human history.”

Elizabeth Shull was born and raised in Southern California. She received a BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and holds an MFA from Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. More Than the Moment is the artist’s solo presentation with M+B. Elizabeth Shull lives and works in Los Angeles. @elizabethshullart

For all inquiries, please contact info@mbart.com .

Elizabeth ShullMore Than the Moment

January 14 - february 4, 2022

Elizabeth Shull
More Than the Moment