ELIZABETH VIRGINIA LEVESQUE

Death and Ponies: NFT Series on OpenSea

After a lot of thought and research, I’ve decided to try my hand at an NFT collection, using the results of part of my painting planing process. I realize many have mixed, or not so mixed feelings about NFTs and crypto in general, but please trust that I’ve been learning a lot about these spaces through my day job and my own efforts, and that I am experimenting with a purpose.

I chose to mint this series of images I took for a specific reason: they are crappy, fast and cheaply assembled, put together in a mad dash and naive way in order to document a thought, which is how I feel about a lot of NFT art. It felt fitting.

I think I’m more excited about blockchain technology and metaverse spaces for other types of artists than for myself. As well as for how this may influence artificial intelligence progress and how art is made and shared, especially ‘installation art’. There is a lot to be rightfully wary of and excited for.

If you want to chat about it, hit me up. My grasp is limited, but I’m always open to conversation and education.

Death and Ponies: Dedicated to Girlhood Grief

Death and Ponies is a vanitas, a genre of art using symbols of death and change as a reminder of their inevitability, inspired photography series by Philadelphia based artist Elizabeth Virginia Levesque.
Elizabeth, a lover of kitsch and childhood superstitions, uses decaying toys from her own childhood and other universal symbols like skulls, combining them with cheap craft materials.
This photography series started as a tool to plan future oil paintings, but soon became their own body of work, as she realized the photos themselves had an intrinsic charm and dark humor that didn’t need to be interpreted through paint to exist as high art. Elizabeth decided to offer them as NFTs, feeling they belonged to this new medium rather than as printed and framed pieces, due to their glitchy and contemporary color schemes and topic, ephemerality, which opposes blockchain tech. The saying goes that the internet is forever, and maybe blockchains are making that truer than ever.

Life Updates

Again and again I keep meaning to update this site and blog, but when I attempt it I become overwhelmed.

It’s been quite a long time since I’ve used this site as an outlet for my creativity and thoughts, and there’s a lot of reasons why. To simplify, I will list them below:

LIFE EVENTS

My father passes away
PAFA graduation with my BFA and Certificate in Painting
ASE PAFA Graduation show
Started an internship at an art appraisal and advisory firm
Started a weekend job at Borrelli’s Chestnut Hill Gallery as a Gallery Assistant
Moved back to Upper Darby into my childhood home/renting from my mother
Curated a PAFA Alumni Exhibition at Borrelli’s
Met my significant other
Covid-19 pandemic begins (world shuts down day after PAFA Alumni art opening)
Became pregnant with my daughter
Internship becomes a full time job as a Marketing & Communications Associate
Finally launch greeting card brand Plenilune Phl Pa Etsy Shop
Give birth and go on maternity leave
Return to work
Company I work for merges with UK based art advisory firm
Partner moves in
Leave weekend gallery job to free up time
Finish Plenilune Phl Website

Sad and wonderful things. An enormous amount of change that is difficult to summarize, but I intend on posting soon about some of these events, especially the art shows, due to wanting to share the amazing work, even if late.

Red – My Martian Landscapes

It’s been over 2 years since I’ve posted here. A lot has happened. There is much to say and share.

Till then, here is a meager offering of content I cobbled together after revisiting my time in school and old artworks. With distance now, I can see that I spent a lot of time flirting with red.

Square contemporary oil painting by Philadelphia, PA artist Elizabeth Virginia Levesque. A girl with pink skin and red hair is submerged up to her shoulders in a red sea. Her eyes are closed. She appears to be resting. Above her a large white cloud sits against teal green sky. Red rain drops pour from the cloud onto the girl and into the red ocean.

Diorama like paper assemblage sculpture features a red sea and teal blue sky. In the red ocean are pink paper mermaids. Red paper drops hang from the assemblage from silk thread strings. A pink fish tail also hangs from the bottom. In the sky are white clouds and a giant eyeball looks down on the scene.

Capacity of Color – PAFA Class Curated Art Show

During the spring semester of 2019 I was enrolled in a class called Exhibitions & Curatorial Visions taught by artist Alexis Granwell. Our assignment was to come up with an art show concept, put out a call for art, curate and install in PAFA’s Anne Bryan Gallery.

We chose the broad theme of color, choosing to privilege this element over all others and titled it Capacity of Color. Every student in the class took on a specific job that goes into throwing a successful art show. I did most of the advertisement collateral: art show flyer, instagram images, press release design and so on.

Capacity of Color was an overall cohesive and successful exhibition. The space, a basement gallery with low ceilings and no natural light, was used effectively. The low placement of many of the displayed sculptures, cleverly created an intimacy between the viewer and art. Other installations, like Suji Kanneganti and Jessica Aquino’s fabric pieces, flowed from floor to ceiling to create an effective upward movement, leading the eye from the floor pieces to the two-dimensional works on the walls.

There was a large number of small pieces in the show, stand alone and in groupings. I believe, if installed in a standard way, they would have been overwhelmed, but instead, they were staggered which helped make a more interesting space and saved each piece from being swallowed by the white walls and basement shadows.

There were a few pieces in the show that I did not feel played well with the rest, and if I was able to change things, I would have left some works out and instead juried other submissions in. I believe that the less representational works were, the more they fit into the overall exhibition.

I learned a lot from the experience and will jump at chances to curate in the future.

Isabelle Schipper, Jessica Aquino,
JP Calabro

The Capacity of Color is a student-curated
exhibition of sculpture, site-specific installation,
painting, drawing, printmaking, and works on paper
from the Brodsky Center Archive. This exhibition deals
with 2D and 3D work that communicates the language
of color in terms of the optical, the symbolic, the
aggressive, the delicate, and the tactile. This grouping
of work pushes the boundaries of the capacity of color
in an expansive and exciting way.
Exhibiting Artists:
Alicia Greco – Ashley Garner – Bernadette Colburn
Bryon Kim – Claire Tenhula – Emma Keller – Iris Padilla
Isabelle Schipper – Jessica Aquino – JP Calabro
Kelly Micca – Kemeys Goethe – Kiki Smith – Nasir Young
Neill Catanguy – Rebecca Giles – Sally Richards
Shane Lowder – Suji Kanneganti – Jiatong Tian

Broken Pony Bouquet – Oil Painting

Square contemporary oil painting by Philadelphia, PA artist Elizabeth Virginia Levesque. Still life painting featuring a vintage My Little Pony pink body. Instead of the pony doll's head is a colorful bunch of flowers sitting in the neck hole like the pony doll is a vase. Conversation candy hearts lay in the foreground. The composition's background is made up of green and teal blue paper.

Unicorns – More Childhood Scribblings

You can practically hear the dot matrix printer grinding away when looking at these pages!

While in elementary school(Garrettford Elementary was a Great Place to Grow!), I participated in some creative writing classes. Our county schools also participated in a program/contest called The Young Authors, where every year kids submitted stories they wrote, which were then judged by grade. I loved it and won several times.

This little book, which I never finished the drawings for all the pages, was from a summer creative writing class. I was likely in 3rd grade at the time. I was really excited when I found this in a box at my parents house. It’s been interesting to see that the themes in my paintings go back so far. Unicorns and skulls.

It’s clear I loved fantasy as a child. My favorite toys were My Little Pony dolls, She-Ra and my Rainbow Brite. This little book was probably a result of watching The Last Unicorn. I also was obsessed with Unico. It was life changing when that came on the Disney channel.