For the last four years, Ellen Orseck has been exploring depictions of turbulent weather. You’re Not In Kansas Anymore was chosen for a yearlong exhibition in Houston’s City Hall. Fifty artists were selected to represent the current Houston art scene and Orseck was one of them.

She is scheduled to present a one-person exhibition at The University of Houston’s/Downtown O’Kane Gallery in 2007 in which her tornadoes will be displayed along other works, which relate to issues of terrorism, racial tension, religious beliefs, failing health, sexual identity and body image. Much of this work grew out of figurative imagery displayed in a 2004 solo exhibition About Face, presented at Montgomery College Gallery in The Woodlands, Texas.

In 2005, her work was published in the catalog for the Texas National Exhibition, juried by artist James Surls, and presented at Stephen F. Austin University in Nacogdoches. Throughout her career, Orseck earned public arts commissions from state arts councils and private patrons in Texas, Oklahoma, Virginia, the District of Columbia and Maryland. Her largest public commission was a mural awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts in her hometown, Baltimore, Maryland.

Orseck studied painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and earned her Masters Degree in Museum Education at George Washington University. Her post graduate education continued in painting and printmaking at the Glassell School of Art, affiliated with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, mentored by Terrell James, Patrick Palmer and Suzanne Manns.

Describing her most recent artwork Orseck said, “Currently, an element of three-dimensionality has developed in which figures are built up from the two-dimensional picture plane with modeling paste and fabric or wire compelling me to confront the ambiguity of what is real and what is illusory.”

She is represented by Bering and James Gallery in Houston, Texas.

Exhibitions of her work include:

• 2007, Made in Texas, Bering and James Gallery
• 2007, Storms, Sumos and Sweets, O'Kane Gallery, University of Houston, Downtown
• 2005, Texas National, Stephen F. Austin University, Nacogdoches, Texas
• 2004, Assistance League Celebrates Texas Art, Williams Tower, Houston, Texas
• 2004, About Face, Montgomery College, Conroe, Texas
• 2004, Free For All, Steve Martin Gallery, New Orleans, Louisiana
• 2003, Humid: Hot Sweet and Sticky, Lubbock, Texas
• 2003 Reflections of Hotel Life, Omni Hotel, Houston, Texas
• 2002 National Small Oil Painting Exhibition, Wichita Center for the Arts, Kansas
• 2002 The Big Show, Lawndale Art Center, Houston, Texas
• 2001 Soul Journeys, The C.J. Jung Center, Houston, Texas