Constructed Space(s)
Etanda Elliott
See it On Campus: Level 2
You can find my work in the Libby Leshgold Gallery.
Visitor Info
first studio
The building depicted in first studio is a barn from the camp that I grew up going to every summer. It was the place where I first fell in love with making art. The painting is an ode to many memories of summers at art camp and to the beginnings of my creative journey.
The painting itself had a complicated journey. I initially fought lots with this work and had a difficult time balancing it’s formal and sentimental components. I had considered the work complete at one point and had even titled it something else, but eventually couldn’t bring myself to look at it so I decided that the painting and I were not quite finished with each other yet. I came back to it with a different approach and took the risk of potentially ruining the painting so that it could have the chance to become something else. This change in direction was partially influenced by Matisse’s The Red Studio and the story around his choice to take that venetian red and additively erase and alter his painting with it.
My second pass at first studio pushed the work and allowed the painting to develop in such a way that it’s come to not only include references to the journey that brought me to art school but to the one I’ve gone through during my time here in my first real studio.
Broader Practice // Constructed Space(s)
I am a multidisciplinary artist primarily working with paint. My works explore modes of seeing and inquiries of perception. I work from a personal archive of photographs, often of mundane subject matter that I encounter across my everyday life. My approach varies, sometimes allowing for a recognizable connection between my photography and my finished work, while at other times taking a more distant or abstract formal departure. I work with paint to expand upon my encounters and experiences with my surroundings; this expansion is contingent on allowing space for both the conscious and unconscious in my artistic decisions. Formally my work borrows from the visual vocabularies of modernist painting, photography and film, print making, collage, and the digital realm.
My practice is currently growing around the idea of Constructed Space(s), both bound and unbound to the canvas. For me this term begins to encapsulate the way I am thinking about the world I move through and the history of the surfaces and materials I am working with. It also describes the formal tendencies that appear in my work. It encompasses my curiosities related to the urban landscape, infrastructure, social constructs, perception, the intersection of place and space. It expresses how my ideas come together on the liminal dimension of my substrate; the way that I awkwardly assemble and represent space in paintings, the visual confusion of layering and depth, and the way geometry, colour, and texture are composed in my work.
I am most often drawn to depicting imagery related to the urban landscape, whether that is industrial and infrastructural objects, windows, architecture, scenes from transit, graffiti, or signage. I am captivated by the way light, particularly reflections and shadows, ephemerally interacts with structure and I enjoy flattening their juxtaposing natures through painting. I am also interested in the relationship between graffiti and infrastructural signage and in exploring the subversion of their relationship through paint. Flattening juxtapositions not only leads to interesting avenues of formal exploration but to potential new understanding and perception of the combined elements. So the flatness of my substrate is often emphasized in my compositions although sometimes I may physically interrupt it by collaging paper elements onto the surface of the canvas, like in my works Fane and Metered Lines .
In my paintings the recognizable is interrupted by my vibrant and decisive use of colour and painterly mark making. Colour is an integral and almost entirely intuitive aspect of my work. I play with the material qualities of oil and acrylic paint emphasizing colour, brush marks, finish, scale, layering, and opacity. My studio work is a matter of investigation and negotiation of how I can best use those material qualities to honour what I see in the world and in the world within the edges of the canvas.
