"K Contemporary is thrilled to announce its debut appearance at The Armory Show in New York City. Featuring Elizabeth Alexander in an immersive solo booth entitled Beautiful Disasters, our installation is part of The Armory's Focus Section. This year's theme highlights the American South—a vital region that is a nexus for diverse populations and a pillar in contemporary American art. 

Elizabeth Alexander convolutes the at-once gentile, elegant, hazardous, and entrenched tones of the American South as she examines the region's social and environmental climate through the remnants of domestic material culture. Collected and exhibited by museums such as Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Mint Museum, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Nasher Museum, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, her work deconstructs and reassembles fine China, found wallpaper, furniture, and decorative household objects to tell exquisite visual stories. Elizabeth lived in North Carolina for years, teaching at UNC’s School of the Arts and connecting with local curators and venues. Now in Massachusetts, she still reckons with her Southern roots, the Civil War, and her ancestors’ complicity with slavery.

Our booth captures her complex affinity to the South with a breathtaking installation of both hand-cut vintage and artist-designed vinyl wallpaper draped around casts of household objects.  Her wallpaper subtly depicts the degradation of flowers and birds from her Southern garden as an ode to the effects of regional flooding and climate change. On plinths and hung on her wallpaper, we’ll show Elizabeth’s reconstructed sconces and porcelain where she has laboriously extracted all of the telltale China patterns that confer value. These meticulous, lace-like pieces include Confederate commemorative plates with all of the offending generals removed, reduced to dust, and collected in glass vials. You can’t erase history, but art can induce nuanced conversations about it.” -K Contemporary