We are living in complicated times. For the paintings in her solo exhibition I Thought I Would ____By Now at The Delaware Contemporary, Elizabeth Bergeland uses visual symbols as a way to try to make sense of the contradictions, anxieties, and pressures of an unpredictable future.

Her statement about the work:

This show gathers paintings from several bodies of work; pieces made years apart but, I now notice, circle the same questions. Bringing these works together has forced me to curate myself backward: to reverse engineer the themes I couldn’t see while I was making them and to find the thread I’ve been pulling at all along. Some of those questions surface most clearly at night, when my mind tends to start its second shift.

Recently, I’ve been painting the scenes I retreat to in my mind to fall asleep. I’m a chronic insomniac, a trait I begrudgingly inherited from my father. Over the years, I have developed elaborate strategies for getting to sleep. One of them: imagining myself in a place where the environment is threatening but I’m in an extremely secure spot. Hidden in a tree, curled into tall grass, wedged into a place no one would think to look. These paintings recreate that impulse. A kind of self-rescue fantasy. Trying to be OK when everything around you is not OK.

The storms in these paintings have nothing to do with the weather. They’re in my head. I’m in my head. I was born into an era of indoor plumbing, antibiotics, climate control, anesthesia, grocery delivery. So why do the storms in my life feel so real? Historically speaking, the level of comfort we consider normal is absurd. But knowing that only helps a little. And only for a little while. Maybe the storm is something else entirely. Maybe it’s the distance between the safety we’ve built and the wildness we lost along the way.

I thought I would be content by now.
I thought I would have systems in place by now.
I thought I would have figured out how to sleep by now.
I thought I would have more resilience by now.
I thought I would be more successful by now.
I thought I would notice that I AM successful by now.
I thought I would have figured out how not to feel sad even when the light outside is perfect by now.
I thought I would have figured out why I get this weird rash sometimes by now.
I thought I would…

I see the same contradictions surfacing again and again in the work: feeling powerful and diminished, nurturer and destroyer, watched and watching, wanting connection while craving solitude. Objects held, dropped, passed, or pulled away. Hands reaching in or reaching out. Something always happening just outside the frame-a string being pulled, an invisible force shifting the scene. Each painting gives me a chance to hold those contradictions still long enough to look at them.

The storms, the eggs, the sunburns, the gestures, the loneliness, the pressure, the tenderness, the dread- they’re all part of the same orbit. They come from the growing suspicion that no one is in charge, and a dismantling of the quiet belief that I will eventually “arrive.” I’m just circling the same tension: the distance between who I thought I would be and who I actually am.

This exhibition closes 11/29/26.