Exposures: Elizabeth A. Rudnick: TREASURE/TRASH

For the summer installment of Exposures, The Warhol presents an original installation, TREASURE/TRASH, by Elizabeth A. Rudnick. A local emerging artist, Rudnick situates her work in dialogue with Warhol’s late-print portfolio Truck (1985), which he produced to commemorate the twentieth World Congress of the International Road Transport Union. After researching works in the museum’s collection, Rudnick was struck by the visual parallels between Warhol’s truck prints and her own work. In 2014, Rudnick created a series of abstract paintings based on the vibrant colors and geometric shapes of traffic barriers and large urban dumpster, ubiquitous objects that silently populate city streets and alleys. Taking inspiration from Warhol’s late prints on view in the museum’s Andy’s Toy Box gallery, Rudnick created three new large-scale abstract paintings, installed in The Warhol Store’s street-facing windows.

The installation TREASURE/TRASH also incorporates store merchandise, including banana products, bookends that look like balloon dogs, and penny banks made from large Coca-Cola bottles.

Elizabeth A. Rudnick lives in Pittsburgh’s East End neighborhood. In 2012 she received her BFA with a focus in painting and digital photography from Carnegie Mellon University. Combining photography and abstraction, Rudnick creates a complex dialogue between the unmarked borders between perception and memory; presence and absence; and arousal and fear. Rudnick was featured in the 2015 group exhibition Screen Memories at Point Park University, and she has shown her work in Pittsburgh at The Mine Factory, Silver Eye Center for Photography, and Three Rivers Arts Festival Juried Visual Arts Exhibition.

Exposures is curated by Jessica Beck, associate curator of art.