Exhibition Runs: March 6 – April 12, 2025
Reception & Community Celebration: Saturday April 12, 4:30pm – 7:30pm
Reception & Community Celebration
Encompass is Harwood’s capstone celebration for the year. We invite everyone to this free event as we come together in community! You are invited to the Exhibition Reception + Open Studios on Saturday, April 12th from 4:30-7:30pm at Harwood Art Center.
All five of the featured Encompass exhibitions will be displayed March 6 – April 12, 2025 at Harwood Art Center.
Gallery Hours:
This exhibition is accessible to view by the public on Thursday – Saturday from 10am-3pm.
What is Yours in Not Yours by Elton Burgest & Lisa Co
Separation is ubiquitous. Every aspect of public space, from the borders of a country to the fence between two neighbor’s properties, is demarcated by a line – real or unreal. Fences, walls and borders symbolize many things beyond separation, they can mean exclusion, safety, status. Non-physical fences delineate poverty vs affluence, digital life vs physical life, us vs them. Language is a fence that separates through cultures, education, neighborhoods, even social class. A fence (real or unreal) can both separate and encircle or bind together a population, collection or space. In this way, separation works as a paradox, something that can be had through not having, or vice versa. In What is Yours is not Yours, Lisa Co and Elton Burgest explore the breadth of themes connected to both physical fences and non-physical fences. Lisa Co explores language’s relationship to identity through visual poetry – mutating and chopping sentences to reform linguistic borders in relation to her first generation American and biracial experiencs. Elton Burgest portrays metaphors of morality through spiritual imagery that include representational digital paintings.
Elton Burgest and Lisa Co present their personal stories of separation, boundaries and fences by fusing familiar elements of culturally specific forms, symbols and mediums to create innovative works in contemporary context. Burgest’s works function as a conduit to communicate community rituals, experiences and feelings on African American Christianity. This exhibit balances Burgest’s emotional, religious tableaus and the visceral aesthetics of Co’s woodcut and printed works. The pieced apart works present themes of separation and togetherness – an ability to become whole while also being apart. Burgest’s digital paintings are cut to pieces and posted in the manner of flyers to fence structures to highlight the wholeness of a community in spite of personal and political adversity. Co’s irregular book forms and sequential print imagery are experienced as individuals and as a body of work. The interplay of the austere presence of Burgest’s sculptures with the dispersed nature of Co’s paper works as well as seeing the repeated images as a part and as a whole provides a rhythmic arrangement for the viewer. The sense of opposite scales of work highlight each artist’s voice and reference the breadth of emotional experience within each boundary. Both Elton Burgest and Lisa Co address themes of boundaries as more than physical occurrences; instead they see them as a maze of identity, as positive and negative bindings, as emotional borders.
Elton Burgest and Lisa Co met at Florida State University. Burgest received his BFA in 2018 while Co received her MFA the same year. Elton Burgest is originally from Tallahassee and continues to live and work in his home town as a graphic designer and professional artist. Lisa Co grew up on the SouthEast coast of Georgia and relocated to Florida for school. She continues to live and work in Gainesville, FL as an Assistant Professor of Art at Florida Gateway College.
