Ex2 Traces: Pictures, Prose & Poetry

New works by New Orleans artist and poet Elizabeth Gross examine our interactions, laying bare the contradictions in our perception and understanding of ourselves and others, while holding out the possibility of welcoming this uncertain mode of being.

The works circle the tension between the liberating and confining aspects of allowing multiple, sometimes contradictory truths to be held together in the same thought.






“It is necessary not to be ‘myself,’ still less to be ‘ourselves.’”
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

The part of me that lives in my body does not know the meaning of the word forget.

The part of me that does not live in my body does not want to.

There is no part of me that does not live in my body. 

Elizabeth Gross, Room for Questions

Furthermore, transposition is a criterion of truth. A truth which cannot be transposed isn’t a truth; in the same way that what doesn’t change in appearance according to the point of view isn’t a real object, but a deceptive representation of such. In the mind, too, there is three-dimensional space. Simone Weil




















The city gives one the feeling of being at home.
We must take the feeling of being at home into exile.
We must be rooted in the absence of a place.
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace






The art of transposing truths is one of the most essential and the least known. What makes it difficult is that, in order to practice it, one has to have placed oneself at the center of a truth and possessed it in all its nakedness, behind the particular form in which it happens to have found expression.
Simone Weil, The Need for Roots