Elisabeth Condon: The Seven Seas

In her new painting and drawing exhibition, Elisabeth Condon introduces the 1980s Los Angeles nightclub scene as a metaphor for personal and social transformation. The Tampa and Brooklyn-based artist approaches this landscape as a repository for individual and shared memories, associations, and cultural experiences.

Named after an early 1980s Polynesian-themed bar in L.A., The Seven Seas is comprised of 16 vellum drawings, two scroll paintings, and other discrete paintings that merge the architecture, décor, fashion, and palette of the city’s nightclubs from 1974 to 1981. Glitter, New Wave, and Punk aesthetics culled from personal memories and media images inform these works.

Two scroll-like paintings face each other on the long walls, flanked by paintings on either end of the gallery. The paintings incorporate spray-painted black drywall, stucco, foil, opalescent color, and glitter to mark passages between points of focus while conjuring the outré look of clubs, such as Rodney Bingenheimer’s legendary English Disco in Los Angeles circa 1974.