Elisabeth Smolarz was born in Poland and emigrated to Germany as a teenager. Raised between two cultures affected by communist and democratic systems, and then having moved yet again to the liberal democracy of the US, she creates photography, video, and social interactions investigating how consciousness, perception, identity, and value are formed by one’s cultural mileu.

Smolarz has exhibited her work nationally and internationally for two decades. Her most recent solo exhibition, The Encyclopedia of Things was presented at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey from February 2020 through January 2021, resulting from a multi-year project created with the Town of Guttenberg, NJ, supported by an NEA grant, and featured on PBS on 03/14/20.

In addition to major support received from the National Endowment for the Arts; select honors include participation in the Art and Law Residency, New York City (2019); MASS MoCA Artist Residency, North Adams, MA (2018); Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Residency Program, NYC (2016); among others.

I explore and document the veiled systems of society that determine what makes a person, investigating collective patterns of behavior to expose hidden mechanisms that are ever-present in our culture.Utilizing the multidisciplinary forms of photography, video, sculpture, performance and drawing I explore the social structures which constitute human interaction within a culture. In order to expose collective consciousness, I often ask strangers to become participants and collaborators in my projects. The immediacy of my working method, wherein participants are invited to act freely and with little or no direction before the camera, fosters an improvisational approach that reveals hidden aspects of these structures. The resulting bodies of works often consist of series of case studies which focus on questions of the strategies of our self-definition that are often rooted in our economic, social and cultural surroundings.