About
image: Jeffrey Bergeland
The wonder of instant communication has mutated into an expectation of constant response. We invented machines to save time, to promise ease, to make our lives simpler - only to raise the standard of what it means to be efficient. We weren’t made for a world this fast, yet we are judged and celebrated or forgotten by the speed and aptitude of our engagement. We run toward progress and never ask how we might be affected when we arrive.
I began these paintings as a way of dramatizing my own dread. Everything has become too heavy—the weight of womanhood and motherhood, of ambition and exhaustion, and of technology with its relentless demands. A meditation on contradiction, these works sit at the very center of my ongoing inner war— stretched tight between the desire for connection and the intense need for solitude.
The figures in the self-titled 18-foot-long triptych, While You Were Sleeping seem caught in a slow-motion collision—tangled, frozen, and suspended in the wreckage of a storm that, as the left panel reveals, I am the maker of. Ushering in something terrible, something great, but always something unfamiliar. Sunburns are often a theme in my work, expressing underlying, persistent worry; a sense of being ill-equipped for this planet. Chickens, tagged and tracked, march on the bodies like the daily pecking demands of communication—text faster! Paint faster! And then there’s the war of womanhood: Manage your sex appeal! Manage his ego! I resent it, I revel in it, I resist it, I perform it. Motherhood gave and took everything. A body that creates life and moves through the world as both miracle and hindrance. The doodled faces on the fingers of the figures briefly interject with a note to self: it’s not so serious.
The accompanying works show scenes from home, tinged with unease: a simple setting of hands reaching for potatoes in the foreground of an active arm wrestle, a finger dipped in a fish bowl’s murky water, and children's string hand games on the verge of frustration. In Potato/Potatoe we see a familiar gesture: passing food across the table - but in the background the tension of hands grasped in war. When did even the simplest things in life become complicated? In a world that glorifies being always available, always producing, always on, I crave analog. I crave stillness, yet my ambitions persist. I want both sides of every coin. And so the tensions remain. Unresolved.
Elizabeth Bergeland (b. 1983) grew up in Wyoming and Colorado before earning her BFA in Painting and Anthropology from the University of Colorado in 2006.
Bergeland’s work merges figurative realism with surreal or imagined spaces. Always rich in symbolism, her recent work leans deeply personal, reflecting themes of connection, doubt, and the passage of time.
Her paintings have been exhibited nationally, with her first solo exhibition, Quiet Boy, (Hotbed Gallery, Philadelphia) in 2022. Her work has been featured in Create Magazine, Philadelphia Magazine, Friend of the Artist, 1st Look TV, Root Quarterly, The Visionary Projects, and the 2024 edition of SPRING/BREAK Art Show, where she was selected as the Artist Spotlight curated by the fair’s founders. She is also the illustrator of Being Edie is Hard Today (2019) and The Great Whipplethorp Bug Collection (2021), the latter earning a Kirkus Star, an NPR review, and a spot on Smithsonian Magazine’s “10 Best Children’s Books of 2021.” She lives and works in Philadelphia, PA with her husband and three children.