Serena JV Elston (USA 1987, BFA) is an ancient futurist. Her art asks: in this modern technological race for the new, what have we left behind that we should weave back in again? As machine-based technology increasingly integrates into every aspect of our lives, we crave experiences that make us feel authentic and spontaneous. Her work leverages that collective loneliness to create a participant-generated mythology that constitutes the changes necessary for our continued existence together on this earth. By recontextualizing our origin stories, her work explodes the axonometrics of narratives that no longer serve us. Her research-based practice investigates the disciplines of architecture, agriculture, and ancient history to search for those forgotten tools that connect us to the land, to the people, and to ourselves because in a world defined by its traumas art can be liberatory.

Serena received a BFA in Architecture and Sculpture from MassArt. She was awarded the Bay Area Visual Artist Exhibition Production Relief Grant from Ever Gold [Projects]. She was the 2020 artist in residence at Dream Farm Commons, a gallery in downtown Oakland, CA. During which she exhibited with the group show Future Emergent: Visual Narratives for a Planet in Crisis and Possibility. In 2018, she constructed Siren Island, a floating platform on which performances and other immersive events take place. Siren Island was featured on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle in August 2019 for her play Apotheosis. In October 2020 her first international work was shown by VideoDrome Paris & S.O.F.A. in Lucca, Italy. She presented her first solo exhibition, Fruitful Bodies at Dream Farm Commons through January 2021. She will be in residency at Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Los Angeles from February through March 2021.