Elizabeth Orr
Pedestrian Measures
August 29, 2026
Elizabeth Orr aims to create a language around the potential for minimalism, while attempting to engage contemporary signifiers; specifically, aspects of technology and perception. Her interest in minimalism embraces both the didactic and the playful.
Orr’s sculptures engage the codes of built environments, often taking the form of architectural elements such as louvered shades, electrical outlet plates, readymade objects, and fences. Her wall-mounted, freestanding, indoor, and outdoor sculptures draw on objects that usually linger outside our peripheral vision and are designed to be invisible. Orr uses the phrase “Architectural Attributes’’ to describe elements of her work: abstracted architectural forms that call attention to the ways in which they structure the space, movement, and meanings around them.
“By emphasizing objects that usually linger in our peripheral vision, the artist plays with the mechanisms of framing and exclusion, which makes one believe that her medium is not necessarily sculpture but rather perception itself.”1
For Pedestrian Measures, Orr decontextualizes attributes of windows in Pedestrian Measures 1 & 2. Another term Orr uses to explain her work is “Perceptual Scenarios”. These sculptures are freestanding Formica bases with “Shoe-Printed Strawberry Yogurt”, presenting varied “Perceptual Scenarios”: mediating principles of obscuring, creating scenarios of how one sees through.
Orr uses glass and plexiglass panes as a mediating plane between the viewer and something else. This ‘something else’ could be commerce, technology, another person, from the outside or inside. Glass panes have a substantial symbolic history of being used for consumerism (i.e. window shopping a way to showcase goods on display). The shoe-printed strawberry yogurt obscures the plexiglass (site-specific flip-flops for the Rockaways), creating simultaneously a celebration and critique of commerce between pedestrians and the artwork inside.
“...imagining a person walking perpendicularly on the wall […] an everyday gesture, walking, just as the structure of the window [...] the footprints are placed vertically and force us to [take] a series of logical steps to understand the creative process.”2
Her two exterior wall-mounted works Calibration Screen” and “Indoor,” are modular, containing components that can be separated and recombined. As important as the final sculptural work, is the ability for her works to be moved and to travel efficiently. These sculptures operate as both figurative and minimalist, evoking class perceptions of architectural attributes. Orr’s ultimate aim is to create a language around the potential of minimalism while engaging contemporary signifiers, sculpting aspects of technology and perception.
1. Dominika Tyclz for Bomb Magazine, A conversation with Elizaball-mountedeth Orr, 2024.
2. Luciana Berti for Exhibit Art: Elizabeth Orr & Micah Angelus Pedestrian, at Tarsia, Naples, 2022.
