Elaine Qiu: Afterimage

We have all stood at the edge of something: a life shifting, a community dividing, a nation questioning itself, a world that no longer feels familiar. Afterimage , featuring paintings and drawings by Elaine Qiu made between 2018 and 2025, emerges from years when that edge became impossible to ignore. They gather thresholds, veils, and palimpsests as invitations to sit with uncertainty, to let the ground waver, to let memory fracture and reassemble. Qiu’s layered images bring multiple sensations of time and space into a single work. Each image contains a multitude of spatial impressions that seem to be in the process of unfolding, accumulating, and doubling back, questioning the notion of a stable continuous self or the ability to hold a fixed perspective when facing an uncertain future. Like an afterimage, time itself dissolves, the past lingers within the present, while traces of what has been begin to suggest what might come next. On view Tuesday, February 23, 2027—Saturday, April 10, 2027 About the Artist Elaine Qiu is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, drawing, printmaking, installation, and video. Hovering between abstraction and representation, her work explores liminal spaces, memory, human experience, and change. A Virginia-based artist and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) fellow, Qiu received a Master of Fine Arts from University of Maryland and Bachelor of Fine Arts from George Mason University’s School of Art. She has exhibited at International Art and Artists at Hillyer, the University of Maryland, the Muscarelle Museum of Art, Towson University, and the Torpedo Factory Art Center, among others. She was a 2024 finalist for the Bethesda Painting Awards. Image caption: Elaine Qiu, Crossing , Acrylic on canvas, 84 X 86 x 3 in, 2023