Archive Project 7: Elizabeth Saveri

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The Project Series
Project 7: Elizabeth Saveri

For several years, Elizabeth Saveri has been creating site-specific painting installations based on movement and daily experience. Using the languages of film, photography, and painting, Saveri's body of work exhibited here, combines depictions of places the artist inhabits and of objects she observes, or thinks about, while moving through those spaces. At the Pomona College Museum of Art, she brought together four new, related, series of work, including 360 Degrees in My Apartment, Drive to the Studio, Drive to Work, and The Claremont Series (all 2000, all oil on wood). With an implied linear narrative, the four series together created a single experience that reflects Saveri's take on the world.

Influenced by the film industry of her native Los Angeles, Saveri incorporates a variety of filmic devices into her work-close-ups, pan shots, and blurs-to suggest her movements around and through spaces. These devices enhance the linear narrative, or the storyline, that Saveri created here through her use of 70 small paintings, ranging in size from 1 ½ inch square to 8 by 10 inches. Influenced by photography, she compares her paintings to casual snapshots. In fact, her paintings stem from photographs the artist takes when first beginning a project.

The first series that was encountered by the viewer, 360 Degrees in My Apartment, consisted primarily of paintings that depict the living room of Saveri's home. The actual paintings themselves, as well as the paintings' placement on the wall, reflect the implied action of the artist and a viewer. Beginning and ending with a close-up of the artist's shoes, the viewer is essentially standing in the apartment, looking around the room while doing a complete turn. The larger paintings in this series represent images closer to the viewer, while the smaller shots represent objects in the distance.

Saveri presented the second and third group of paintings, Drive to Work and Drive to the Studio, after the 360 Degrees in My Apartment paintings because they reflect a continuation of the artist's daily experience. The two series start linked together as she leaves her house and heads toward the 110 freeway, but diverge as her commutes diverge, one path toward downtown Los Angeles and her studio, the other toward West Los Angeles and her job.

In The Claremont Series, Saveri continues to explore a new direction in her work by depicting the gallery where the work was shown and where the viewer experienced the paintings. Here, she has expanded this idea to include 35 paintings that chronologically represent her association with Pomona College Museum of Art. They show her first drive to Claremont on a foggy day and her first visit to the Gallery during the Pomona College Student Exhibition. Continuing with her next visit on a sunny day, the series shows the Gallery in the renovation process. Further visits continue to show the progress of the Gallery as it nears completion.

The work of Elizabeth Saveri was the seventh exhibition in Pomona College Museum of Art's Project Series. The exhibition also inaugurates the newly redesigned gallery for the Project Series, and because of the site-specific nature of her work, seemed a complementary choice for the opening of a new exhibition season. This exhibition represented a document not only of her work, but also of major changes undertaken at the Museum over the 2000 summer. The Project Series' ongoing program of small exhibitions brings to the Pomona College campus art that is experimental and that introduces new forms, techniques, or concepts. During each exhibition, participating artists worked with faculty and students in relevant disciplines.

Rebecca McGrew
Curator