Elizabeth Bennett contemporary art
California, USA
In this body of work, I play with jigsaw puzzle pieces. I cut them, reorder them, and glue them onto bristol board with their backs facing the viewer. My idea was to play with the expectations we have of a puzzle. Usually, putting together a puzzle is satisfying. Chaos becomes order. Pieces fit and make sense when put in place. They transform from meaningless to integral. We begin to see beyond any single piece and understand the big picture. It mirrors what we search for in our lives. Instead, I taken the individual pieces apart to find meaning in an alternate ordering.
Picking up the Pieces is a fifteen panel polyptych. In it, I reconfigured each standard puzzle shape into twelve into new shapes that are laid out in grids. Like a personal and cultural Rorschach test, I labeled them with my associations.
Picking up the Pieces
17”h x 11”w each
2019
Picking up the Pieces slideshow
please be patient as each page loads
Redacted II
19"h x 13" w
2020
Memory
19"h x 13"w
2020
Haploid
17"h x 11"w
2019
Missing Links
19"h x 13"w
2020
Disintegrate
17"h x 11"w
2019
Finished
18"h x 24"w
500 piece custom puzzle
2020