Elisabeth Hogeman
- Editor at Titan Contemporary Publishing
- Feb 4
- 2 min read
Elisabeth Hogeman is a collage artist who also works with photography and video and has exhibited across the United States as well as in Canada, and Italy. Recent and notable exhibitions and screenings include Gallery 263 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Logan Center Gallery at University of Chicago, Deluge Contemporary in Victoria BC, Canada, ROMAN SUSAN in Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Spectacle Theater in New York, and Mana Contemporary in Jersey City.
Vanities is a new media collage series by Elisabeth Hogeman which incorporates an assemblage of photographing, stacking, and fragmenting images from home and lifestyle magazines. She then manually and digitally orchestrates them into a singular composition in which Elisabeth adds digital shadows in order to achieve the effect of glass-like configurations. The works become printed, cut up, reconfigured, and re-photographed, creating a thoroughly new media process. These collages express the trompe l’oeil effect of illusory mirrors within interiors. Citing the 17th-century Dutch vanitas tradition, Elisabeth Hogeman invents elaborate architecture and interiors with strategic motifs which are symbolic of death and extensions of human anatomy. Such rooms, devoid of figures, are meant to represent psychological impulses as to our relationships with contemporary spaces using domestic objects and still life.
Mostly containing neutral tones, with some containing soft pastel colors, the collages of Elisabeth Hogeman reveal ominous, mythological contemporary realms which are hallucinogenic and an expression of quiet mania. The manic stability of multiple angles creating a heightened sense of visual stimulation and awareness becomes subdued by quiet colors and an organized composition. These works reflect a state of confusion as if we have entered an interior which was disassembled and reconfigured into an illusory apparitional house of mirrors. As if the windows and glass of the architecture had snapped, broke, and reassembled into cohesive fragmented structures to have us reconsider the purpose we spend our time indoors. Such dreamlike scapes has us reimagine the purpose of collage and photography as realms of illusion to manipulate our philosophical understanding of visual interpretation rather than for documentative or theatrical purposes.
Cruciferous (pictured above), according to the title, represents a cabbage-like structure, however the central configuration may seem to resemble a skull with the interior tiles almost seemingly like teeth. The various structure, perspective, and manipulated angles of the floor tiles create hyper-realistic distortions of reality with photographic precision. With the walls covered in shadow and crystalized appearances within the central motif, the work may convey a sense of morbidity, apparitional experience, or ominous reaction.
Enchanting and nuanced, the collage work of Elisabeth Hogeman has the viewer reimagine how interior spaces can define our sense of roles within society and relationships with ourselves. These quiet compositions evoke an eerie sense of solace and contemplation contained within unfamiliar imagery reflected in glass and mirror-like structures. The hyper-realistic illusion of space being manipulated to the whims of Elisabeth Hogeman’s imagination are conducted in a manner which may seem to have the artist behave as a grand illusionist or wizard. One who twists and distorts space to confuse and challenge us, but also to persuade the viewer to rediscover how confined space defines our sense of inner-dimensionality and emotional as well as psychological impulses.
