Elizabeth Glaessner’s paintings emerge from a liquid, porous realm of dreams and visions, where the subconscious surfaces and dissolves in the in-between state where abstraction and figuration blur. There is something at once haunting and unsettling, yet also seductive and revealing, in Glaessner’s ghostly, diaphanous figures. Inhabiting a liminal territory, a suspended limbo, her orgies of dissolving bodies and transmigrating souls become translucent presences that summon either our deepest nightmares or deepest desires. Torn between hallucination and vision, body and psyche, these figures drift in a fluid, amorphous state of continuous metamorphosis, merging with their nebulous surroundings in a perpetual blurring of inner and outer worlds.
As Glaessner explains when we met in her Brooklyn studio, the new works she will present this September at P·P·O·W originate from a meditation on the body—its physical reality, but also its inherently relational nature. “I’ve been thinking about the body and its borders—how the body itself can be understood as a kind of porous vessel. A vessel that is always in exchange with its environment, connected and constantly in dialogue with what surrounds it.”
Unsurprisingly, Glaessner sees painting as above all a tool of self-exploration, one that lets her probe beneath the surface of the everyday and delve into the subterranean, often hidden truths and layered meanings of both the self and the collective.
Some of her drawings emerge from her practice of dream analysis, she explains. “Sometimes I’m talking with my analyst about something, and I notice I’m getting caught up in language, so instead, I’ll make a drawing. I have a collection of these really quick sketches, almost immediate responses,” she says, pointing to a set of black-and-white works marked by stark contrasts of light and shadow, the charcoal traces evoking epic scenes that recall the mythical and oneiric visions of Dürer, Goya or Redon. These works, she acknowledges, are a new development, born out of necessity: long accustomed to working in color with gouache, always at a table, she moved into her current studio and never set up the table again, forcing a shift in her process. What emerged were hauntingly refined, ominous automatic drawings, which she later revisits, using them as seeds for her paintings. “It becomes this ongoing process of watching how ideas evolve or how something gradually comes into fruition.”
Once she moves to the canvas, her approach opens into an even more fluid dimension. She sometimes begins with intuitive pours and washes, layering pigments so the image can gradually reveal itself. Embracing accident and chance as much as the intention behind a gesture, she allows the painting to find its own flow, guided by spontaneity and the liquidity of the medium.
Glaessner insists on keeping the process open, as that is what allows the subconscious to enter the work. “It allows for elements I didn’t plan, and without that space, the work risks being only as good as the limits of whatever idea I started with,” she reflects. For her, the goal is never to illustrate an idea or a dream literally. Seeds from dreams may resurface, but their meanings reveal themselves gradually as they return in the paintings, often transformed, absorbed or evolved through the process itself.
The human body, notably, is presented by Glaessner as a porous membrane, a vessel in continuous dialogue and exchange with its surroundings. What she seeks to visualize is this liminal space between the body, the skin and the sensations triggered by external forces, but also the psychological and emotional elaborations that extend beyond the limits of our physical, sensorial presence. For Glaessner, it is compelling to see how the body can become part of a landscape, generating its own emotional terrain that reflects how phenomena unfold around and within us, carried and amplified throughout the body as it engages with our psyche and mythical imagination.
One of the works in the show is a striking close-up of a woman purging material, as if rejecting something toxic or releasing psychic energy from within the body’s barrier. “It’s this sort of exorcism, which connects back to some surreal experiences I had as a kid,” Glaessner reflects, noting how this theme often resurfaces in her work as well as in her dreams. She describes herself as not religious but raised Catholic on her mother’s side, which brought intense religious encounters into her life early on. She recalls seeing videos of exorcisms that left a deep impression. “My parents divorced when I was young—my dad is not religious, and my mom grew up Catholic—so there was always this contrast around religion and belief shaping my early experiences,” she shares. That contrast, she suggests, could help explain the sense of torment, psychological tension and unease bound up with the weight of Catholic guilt, alongside a longing for forgiveness and redemption.
In this painting, however, Glaessner sought to transform that experience so it is no longer tethered to demons but reframed as something generative. “I began to see it as a kind of gestation and birth, a theme which in many ways runs through the work in this show—letting go of one thing, to become something else,” she reflects, citing inspiration from Julia Kristeva’s writing on abjection, where the mouth is described as a site of rupture. “That felt like an especially charged subject to explore, a place where boundaries collapse and something new can emerge.”
In another painting, a humanoid figure appears in costume, caught in the act of crawling—a pose that recurs throughout Glaessner’s work. For her, the gesture carries something essential: it is the first movement before walking, the earliest stage of becoming, but also a reminder of the body’s primal link to the animal world.
“My figures often feel caught in transmutation or mutation, not as fixed entities but as shifting beings in a process of change,” she notes, explaining how even the crawl embodies this in-between state—not only a passage between stages of growth but also between conditions of being: the instinctual creature and the human, the individual and the collective, the self and something beyond.
All of Glaessner’s paintings inhabit thresholds of becoming, where bodies are never fully stable or self-contained but instead continually move from one phase into another—a visual meditation on transformation and vital interrelation. Her work consistently challenges the notion of the body as a fixed and isolated entity, embracing instead its organic and emotional porousness and fluidity as an essential existential condition. These reflections resonate with Karen Barad’s notion of “intra-action,” introduced in Meeting the Universe Halfway (1997), which posits that distinct, bounded entities emerge only through entanglements within broader networks of matter and meaning.
Glaessner partly traces this awareness to her upbringing in Houston, a city marked by constant floods and its proximity to the Gulf of Mexico. “Swimming in the ocean there is its own kind of paradox,” she reflects. “You’re immersed in the water, very aware of how permeable your body is, and you feel very tied to these water systems and cycles that extend far beyond you. And in Galveston, when you look out at the horizon, those oil rigs interrupt the view—a stark reality of how water itself is commodified and contaminated.”
In other paintings, feminine figures appear to be splitting, doubling and dissolving into multiple versions of the self. Glaessner says she has been thinking a lot about Ovid’s Metamorphoses—how, in those myths, women are often transformed or transform themselves into bodies of water as a means of protection. “But what does it mean when those bodies of water, once a refuge, are now contaminated, no longer safe? The very space of protection is compromised,” she reflects.
In one of the largest canvases, a woman’s body lies on the shore like a whale carried by the tide. She holds a paintbrush in one hand: the image of the artist herself, borne by subconscious forces that led her to gestate this powerful, evocative scene. In the water, a ghostly female figure advances, representing a past version of the self she is releasing. A lizard lingers as the only silent witness, as if to bid farewell to what has been left behind.
For Glaessner, the tension between immersion and extraction, arrival and departure, gestation and release, intimacy and exploitation reflects how far we have drifted from the environment we depend on. Bodies of water embody both connection and contradiction, anchoring us even as we reshape and detach from them. In these reflections, she has also been inspired by Astrida Neimanis’s Bodies of Water, a posthumanist feminist phenomenology that challenges us to stop imagining water as something separate and recognize it as inseparable from our bodies. “We eat it, drink it, feed it and everything we do eventually cycles back into it,” Glaessner says.
“As droughts, floods and shifting climates intensify, the way water is treated reflects back on us,” she adds, noting how bodies are implicated in this cycle. “The rivers are now exhausted before they reach the sea,” Astrida writes—a hauntingly beautiful and terrifying line in its truth.
From these reflections comes the exhibition’s title, “Running Water,” which is also the name of a song by the late Texas singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston. In it, he asks: Running water, where are you running from? You always seem to be on the run. That personification of water struck Glaessner deeply, underscoring not only a sense of flow and vitality but also of escape, exhaustion and entanglement. “Water becomes not just an element or resource, but a mirror, reflecting how bound up our bodies, histories and futures are in its flow,” she says.
It is striking, then, how Glaessner’s paintings—despite their liquidity—often appear caught in the instant when water suddenly freezes, holding for a moment the possibility of epiphanic clairvoyance, an image or symbol surfacing from the subconscious stream. “Flowing water constantly distorts a reflection—always shifting, never fixed—while stagnant water offers a moment of clarity, a frozen image that holds you in place,” the artist notes. That stillness, which might precede another transformation, becomes as essential as the movement that follows; no forward shift is possible without first pausing to reckon with what came before, to catch the foreboding signs of what lies ahead.
This kind of crystallized pause—where things settle, however uneasily—also creates the ground for change. “It’s like the rational pause that makes the emotional surge possible,” Glaessner reflects. “The frozen reflection and the flowing distortion aren’t opposites, but part of the same cycle of seeing, confronting and shifting.”
To press this point, Glaessner often introduces small animals or micro-viewers in her canvases—figures that hover at the margins like specters or spirits. A recurring lizard, for instance, acts as a kind of familiar, already inhabiting the threshold between states and worlds, reminding us that even stillness is never empty but always charged, always anticipating future events or haunted by past ones.
Ultimately, this is why any unilateral categorization of Glaessner’s work—figurative, surreal, symbolic—inevitably feels reductive. In her hands, the figure is only one element among many, no more central than color, gesture, or atmosphere. A dimension of thresholds emerges: ambiguous spaces that resist closure, leaving room for anyone to step inside.
In this sense, Glaessner taps into a third mythical substratum beyond the physical and factual world and the psychological realm where matter and psyche negotiate. Oscillating between the two, her powerful images enter a mythical third space where archetypes reveal themselves in their universal force, resonating with something deeper and shared in the human condition. As she acknowledges, there is indeed the collective unconscious, yet the way archetypes weave into individual experience charges them with distinct meaning in ways that resonate across time and space.
It is precisely this in-between space that Glaessner creates, a threshold where symbols reveal themselves within the wider networks they belong to. In this mythological register, both physical and psychological reality expand, mystery replaces history and the enigmas of the soul can be explored. It is the liminal dimension just before the shift between physical and psychical, individual and collective. “That’s the space I find most alive, because it’s undefined. It holds all these potential pasts and futures at once, before any single path is fixed.”
The space Glaessner evokes is one that helps us recognize ourselves as part of a larger story and natural order: a mythical imagination that offers deep insights and a greater capacity to grasp truth and meaning beyond the individual or the factual, beyond time and space. “As porous, permeable beings, there is possibility in our interconnectedness with each other and with the environment,” she says. Her paintings suggest both the vulnerability of our bodies and a way of transcending them, envisioning new systems of relation and resonance with the world around us.