Elisabeth Condon, Daisy Face, acrylic on linen, 2023
Elisabeth Condon: Impossible Landscape
October 10 - November 7, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, October 10, 6-8pm, Fiendish Plots
Fiendish plots is open Saturdays and Sunday 1-4pm, or by appointment
Public Lecture: Friday, October 10, 2pm, Richards Hall 218
(University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 560 Stadium Dr, Lincoln, NE 68508)
This lecture is a part of "The Artist's Life Lectures" series and is free and open the the
public.
Fiendish Plots proudly presents Impossible Landscape by Elisabeth Condon.
Elisabeth Condon’s multilayered paintings reference Chinese scrolls, postwar
abstraction, vintage textile patterns, nightclubs, and her immediate surroundings. They
approach landscape as a synthetic construction that is simultaneously real and artificial.
As a child in 1960s LA, Condon envisioned her parents’ Asian-inspired wallpaper as a
backdrop for the rivers and rocks in a nearby canyon. Now, she “associates seasonal
migrations between her studios in New York and Florida with the way both landscape
and time are represented in 5th Century Tang Dynasty paintings.” Experiencing
landscape and time as constant movement, she begins each painting with a pour, a
planned accident around which to build the composition. Condon contradicts the pure
abstraction with imagery and patterns that complicate the surface and unfolding of time.
“The more I read about women artists in the sixties and seventies, the more I realize
that to claim being an artist was for them an active form of feminism. There’s an aspect
of pouring and tidying in my own process that I now understand is to paint myself
through my own social conditioning, conditioning in religion to domination and
submission.
I take transcendence for granted vis-à-vis painting. Painting is a form of working toward
it. It’s no surprise that calligraphy and mountain-water painting are meditative
techniques involving mindfulness. Through lattice and pour, I explore the dynamic of
feeling and thinking.”
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All quotes from Emerson Dorsch, Tempus Fugit press release (2023)