Lisa Greif

My current body of work focuses on the relationship between politeness and self-inhibition. I am interested in examining how people negotiate between considering the needs of others and asserting personal boundaries. All too often, I choose the well-laid path of compulsory niceness at the expense of honest communication and self-protection. While this is a struggle embedded in my own identity, I am interested in examining its connection to social pressures and broader human dilemmas.

This struggle for authenticity and self-hood is addressed through tedious and repetitive drawing and scraping away to reference traditional feminine work. By choosing to use traditional working methods that are both meditative and physically restrictive, I am thinking about how adhering to social expectations can be simultaneously comforting as a tool of camouflage, and alarming in terms of losing personal identity.

In my experience, pressures to be polite and accommodating blur the lines between behaviors that are pleasing to others, and what desires are internally motivated. My work questions whether it is even possible to maintain boundaries of a self that is by nature in constant flux.