PORT ANGELES — A solo exhibition by Port Townsend artist Elissa Greisz titled “Material Witness” will be on display in the Pirate Union Building Gallery of Art at Peninsula College through March 14.

The artist will present a talk in the Little Theater at 12:30 p.m. Thursday as a part of the college’s Studium Generale lecture series, with a reception following in the gallery.

Both the exhibition and Studium events are free and open to the public.

“My artwork is a hybrid,” Greisz said. “I pull references from various cultures and use unusual materials – from linoleum floor tiling to nail polish to cast-off aluminum printing plates — to create a collage-like synthesis.”

Greisz, who has been part of numerous exhibitions around the country, said she can trace her hybrid forms to her early years.

Looking back

In the 1960s, she moved to the bohemian community of Topanga Canyon near Los Angeles and attended art school at University of California — Los Angeles, studying traditional forms of drawing and painting.

At school, she attended her first 1960s “happening” — a performance work that did not end until everyone in the audience left. Soon after, she attended meetings of what later became “Womanspace” — a feminist art collective started by Judy Chicago.

These experiences shifted her perspective and her work became “experimental and abstract as [she] began to paint with glitter and opalescent nail polish on rice paper and made sculpture with Wonder bread,” according to organizers.

In the 1980s, she began to work with “iridescent diffraction foil” — a prismatic material that she ordered in bulk to create large weavings and sculptural wall works and installations.

Around this time she also started to glue the foil onto painted post cards and soon after, linoleum floor tiles and later, aluminum litho plates, creating large wall works of collaged forms.

“I borrow from Byzantine art, my Mexican heritage, sci-fi illustrations, other art, ornamentation, jewelry and tattoos,” Greisz said.

“And the transformation of inert materials becomes my modern-day alchemy. I’m an obsessive mark maker and continue experimenting, and finding the unexpected, the strange and beautiful, the evocative, uncanny and the sometimes funny.”

For more information, contact Michael Paul Miller at mpmiller@pencol.edu.

“Ancient Secrets” by Elissa Greisz during her solo exhibition titled “Material Witness” will be on display in the Pirate Union Building Gallery of Art at Peninsula College through March 14.