Elisa Ahmer

Elisa Ahmer uses an inward perspective of experience and works with images from dreams and from the “wakeful dreaming” states of meditation and daydreams. Oil paintings, watercolor, and pinhole photography are the settings for these personal mythologies and fairytales. Mostly based in the natural world, the images are like a shamanic bridge between the real and ethereal, the natural and supernatural and help give meaning to these mysterious spaces. Themes of place emerge. Places of longing, grief, loneliness, and within these struggles finding places of beauty and hope.

Elisa holds a BFA in painting from Northern Illinois University and was awarded a residency at Anderson Ranch Art Center in Snowmass, Colorado. She has taught drawing, painting, and writing to children and adults at the Red Brick Center for the Arts in Aspen, Colorado, the San Luis Obispo Art Museum in California and the Rockford Art Museum in Illinois. Her work was included in the 2018 Dubuque Museum of Art Biennial and the 2020 Rockford Art Museum Midwestern Biennial. She currently lives and works in Leaf River, Illinois.

     Visions, dreams and daydreams are the under- conscious images I work with. The artworks are concrete visual experiences that help make sense of the inner pictures. They are personal mythologies and fairy tales that can clarify the unconscious ways I may behave and think. The works are like shamanic bridges between the real and ethereal, the natural and supernatural and help give meaning to these mysterious places. They uncover what’s hidden beneath conscious reality. Then I can look at how the personal relates to the trans-personal and if they have a connection to our ancient mythological stories and how both can be used in the context of everyday life.

     Most of the images are based in the natural world. This is where I thrive and glean the metaphors that come into view. I’m called to remember the wildness within and the connection to and dependence on it. The settings in nature hold places of grief, loneliness and longing and also hopeful resonance among the beautiful. I frequently have visions of paintings while in meditation. The stillness seems to call them in. I hope the work can be a guide and authentic voice from a visionary encounter that is just as tangible as the solid ground we walk on.

IL