Elizabeth Dimitroff

Elizabeth Dimitroff is a London-based artist who is currently completing an MA at the Royal College of Art. She earned her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2017 and has exhibited work in exhibitions across Europe and the United States. She recently exhibited work in Unladylike at D Contemporary in Mayfair, and will be exhibiting in Nº20 Arts Graduate Show in September 2023. Elizabeth is the co-founder of the newsletter, God Save the Scene, a digital platform profiling London’s emerging art scene.

When we revisit sites where momentous personal events have occurred, disparate moments begin to coincide, temporality is distorted, the arrow becomes a boomerang. We are left to navigate and evolve with these two versions of time and the various versions of ourselves that exist in parallel at the site of strong memories or dreams.

My work has revolved around this theme and I have sought answers to the following questions: To what extent does the archive of our past experiences cohere as a body of knowledge that can be reliably referenced when interpreting the present moment? Is a dreamt, felt, ephemeral or past reality in fact any less real than a present one? How does the relationship we have with these versions of ourselves evolve over time? I have been excited by the way in which these themes lend themselves to our perception of time. More specifically, the ways in which the site of a significant memory or dream has the ability to confuse our perception of the present.

Multiple versions of the same figure appear in a number of the works. The transparency of their body parts and the obscuring of the figures’ eye sockets prevent tangible contact with one another or with the viewer. We may find ourselves in the company of our past selves, but the relationship is, for better or worse, a solitary one.