About

Serena JV Elston is a transdisciplinary sculptor contemplating the body and its relationship to structures of power. Her research-based practice explores ecology, posthumanism, disability, and embodiment through a post-colonial lens. At its core, her practice asks if an institution has the power to disable a body, does the body have the power to disable an institution? Grappling with the identity of disability, she depict figures in various stages of decomposition and incompleteness. Her work seeks to make visible the precarious materiality of structures to reveal them as inherently temporal. 

Institutions are not independent from the mortal bodies that serve them. In this way individual acts of maintenance become political and ‘disability’, rather than ‘wellbeing’, is relegated as a colonial determination of labor potential that is designed to diminish our humanity in institutional settings. Serena’s art reflects on the fragility of the bodies we inhabit and rely upon and the porosity between the two.

Serena’s background in architecture and production, Serena has initiated ambitious curatorial projects such as SPACORE, a platform centered around lived experiences within wellness capitalism, and Siren Island, a floating stage reimagining land mythologies through live theater events on the open water. Her work has been exhibited both in the United States and internationally, including at Ever Gold [Projects] in San Francisco, VideoDrome Paris, S.O.F.A. Italy, Watershed Art&Ecology in Chicago, and the MOAH Museum in Lancaster, California.

Serena is a recipient of the Pritzker Family Foundation Scholarship and holds an MFA in Sculpture from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in Architecture and Sculpture from MassArt in Boston.

More information on past shows and publications.