Liza Jo Eilers uses painting, collage, and sculpture to work through the double stake of popular culture’s representation of women and its tendency to both resist and reinforce its dominant ideals and values. Eilers parses through the historicized patriarchal gaze and asks questions of not only what we see today, but more importantly how these modes of seeing have become interwoven in our cultural and national identity itself, especially in relation to American culture’s failures and its aftermath over the past few decades. Through modes of entertainment, Eilers’ artworks consider what it means to have a good time, who is a good time, and for whom are the times good. Most recently, Eilers’ wet t-shirt paintings—where she uses white hydrochromic ink as a censor—examine the All-American Girl Next Door, who operates parallel to actual male desire, sometimes revealing what’s expected and other times not. She wonders: Does the pleasure of revealing the image supersede the image itself? Or is it another facade of beauty and celebration with more sinister undertones.

Liza Jo Eilers was born in 1993 in  St. Paul, MN, and lives in Chicago, IL. Eilers earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, IL (2020) and a BA in Industrial Design from the University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, IN (2015).

Eilers has held recent solo and two-person exhibitions at Grove in London, UK; Roommate in Chicago, IL; Material Room in Richmond, VA; Yew Nork in Chicago, IL; SULK CHICAGO in Chicago, IL; and Rainbo Club presented by M. LeBlanc in Chicago, IL.

She has participated in recent group exhibitions at De Boer Gallery in Los Angeles, CA; Guerrero Gallery in Los Angeles, CA; Anthony Gallery in Chicago, IL and Tokyo, Japan; Espace Maurice in Montreal, Canada; Good Weather x M. LeBlanc at Rainbo Club in Chicago, IL and Night Club Gallery in St. Paul, MN.

Eilers is a recipient of the Hopper Prize and Soho House Dreamers in Residence Grant.