With a background in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, Elizabeth Demaray’s art highlights the kind of incongruities and unexpected connections one finds between the named world and the real. Demaray knits sweaters for plants, manufactures alternative forms of housing for hermit crabs and recently created listening stations for birds that play human music in the woods of Pennsylvania. She states “my interest in both science and art making has been the relationship between perception and non-logical thought. As an artist, I create work that is not rationally based, but may instead be understood in the light of basic psychological needs, such as care, control, taxonomy and love.”
“Demaray provokes complex questions concerning memory, knowledge, and the collaborative cognitive process that exists between artist and viewer while making a body of work that has consistently confounded expectations by creating connections between diverse and often contradictory bodies of knowledge.”
–Richard Klein, Exhibitions Director, Aldrich Museum
Demaray is the recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts 2005 NYFA Fellowship in Sculpture, the 2003 Aldrich Emerging Artist Award at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield CN, the 2001-2002 National Studio Award at the New York Museum of Modern Art / P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. The Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Purchase Award for West Coast Museums, the Emerging Artist Fellowship Award at Socrates’ Sculpture Park, The Art Omi Residency Award, The Altoids/ New Museum Curiously Strong Purchase Award, The Headlands Center for the Art California Artist in Residence Award Fellowship, the Sauza Tequila Bay Area Purity Award and the Headlands Center for the Arts Post Graduate Studio Award Fellowship. Her work has been shown at The California Museum, The deYoung Artist’s Studio at the M.H. deYoung Memorial Museum in San Francisco, The University Art Museum at Berkeley, The L.C. Bates Museum of Natural History in Mane, The Project Space at The Headlands Center For The Arts, The Historic Nike Missile Site at the Marin Headlands, The New York Museum of Modern Art / P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, The New Museum New York, The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Arthouse, Austin TX, Consolidated Works, Seattle WA, and the Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield CN.