Elizabeth Chapin

Deconstructing Nostalgia is a series of figurative portrait paintings by American artist, Elizabeth Chapin, that uses the language of her traditional Southern upbringing to reveal certain truths masked by gentility, beauty and decoration. Deconstructing Nostalgia was first exhibited at a 2019 solo exhibition at the Wally Workman Gallery in Austin, TX. 

Being raised in the South comes with a relentless and narrowly defined (yet cleverly downplayed) ideal of success and beauty.  This culture of propriety and hospitality exposed Chapin to what she perceived as having an anesthetic effect on the society around her, exchanging pleasurable status quo for capitulation. The series Deconstructing Nostalgia rose out of Chapin’s awareness of her inability to recognize the constraints these social systems have and the privilege of not having to confront that reality. 

Embellishing her 3D portrait works with undulating fringe, silk and tulle ruffles, neon curls and crystallized plexiglass “lace”, Chapin developed her own visual vernacular to explore themes of nostalgia, privilege and discomfort. These figurative paintings are manifestations of Chapin’s desire for women to be utterly themselves--free of both shame and duress. The subjects, many of whom are Chapin’s daughter and her friends, are presented in the language of a Southern childhood, through prettiness and decoration. 

The work, Ultralight Beam, continues to use Chapin’s method of incorporating mixed media on 3D canvas, set against the backdrop of a Kanye West concert. While West is a contradictory and polarizing figure,  few people expose Chapin to her own anger, anxiety, and addiction so viscerally. There is a worshipful and unilateral quality to his music, a lush spiral of chaos and love. West’s white fans (in this case, Chapin’s son and friends) worshipfully consume his music, without sacrifice or full comprehension. There is an obvious, yet complicated irony, and as a mother, who is trying to make sense of herself, her son, and the ongoing anesthetic of privilege in the world, the irony becomes punctuated for Chapin. Re-enacting van der Weyden’s pose in the Deposition of Christ, Ultralight Beam is a manifestation of devotion, white privilege, maternal loss, drunkenness, chaos and fear. Deconstructing Nostalgia constructs a pathway between the idea of nostalgia (or status quo) and radical inclusivity. The need for certainty divides us and embeds us within our own unmoving beliefs, with little curiosity or tolerance. We search for meaning and community, but are unwilling to inhabit the spaces where that might be cultivated; places we don’t understand or that make us feel awkward. Nostalgia has the ability to both build connection and destroy it and through her work, Chapin unravels what that nostalgia means and how it has the powerful ability to hold us where we are.

For the opening exhibition, Chapin created a sweets table of petit fours, small cakes, French in origin, and common in white ceremony in the American South.  Each cake is iced with a word her mother often uses to describe the ideal daughter—soft, poised, feminine, sweet, etc. In the center of the table is her mother’s epergne, a French candy dish, filled with sour belt candy. Chapin made the tablecloth from wax print fabric, generally associated with African, particularly West African identity, but can be traced back to 4th century Egyptian mummies, 8th century Indian and Chinese batik, and most prevalently 12th century Indonesia. The Dutch industrialized the Indonesian batik process in the 1850s but ended up having a more enthusiastic reception in Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal. The patterns in the fabric changed to reflect the stories of these African communities. Today wax fabric is a symbol of African power and identity. Chapin used this fabric to create a frilly and colorful foundation for a buffet of nostalgic sweets, representing the dark side of gentility and the complexity of appropriation--a history of creating beauty and culture not possible without systems of dehumanization.