4/23/2006

Jon Elliott

18 comments:

Painter said...

Jon Elliott
@ 31GRAND
31 Grand St.
Brooklyn, NY 11211

http://www.jonelliottonline.com/

Max said...

I like this one a lot. Can't wait to go see the show. From the jpeg, the hyper-real look reminds me of Alexis Rockman (who also has a very interesting show up right now), but with more subtlety. Love the severed tree limbs and drain pipe. Interesting how he manages to let his landscape remain beautiful depsite it's emaciation. Such is the power of nature, which may be the one subject most easily paired with an objective quality of beauty.

I think most of the recent paintings of idealized states of nature have the hidden inuendo that we are phucking up said state. Magid, Rockman, Simen Johan, Bas... What's different about this painting is that it chooses to frame this yearning in the negative, showing the ugly side of what is going on rather than the magic/beautiful side that we are missing.

rainbowandskull said...

The handsome men of 31GRAND

pinkandlacepony said...

Exu- why are you so unhappy? What is it that you do in this world that allows you to feel so entitled to judge these artists so harshly?

zipthwung said...

I love the apocalypse, so close to my heart. Movies like Soylent Green and Silent Hill,

books like No Blade of Grass and Silent Spring.

There's a town in India that is so pollusted from recycling CRT's (the copper coil) that people get sick and stuff from the lead in the CRT glass. Awesome!

So when I see someone coat their paintings in highly toxic two part epoxy resin, it reminds me of the good old days. (I used a whole gallon of the stuff on a sculpture and I dint add enough catalyst or "kicker" and it wasnt ventilated and I enjoyed that.

Remember the seventies? EPA this and EPA that?

I do.

Which is why I like 31 grand so much. It's a gallery that's not afraid of macrame and tweed, situated in the heart of a polluted urban shithole. Its a gallery that will show folk art to rival the Foxfire series.

Adolescent urges indeed!!!!

But back to Silent Hill. I saw it. It was terrible. Not because of the ecological horror story of a "mine fire" that decimates a whole Wiccan community (Silent Hill), but because it doesn't follow the video game beyond a superficial knod to a few "cinematics" or "cut scenes" as they are called.

I'm a huge fan of first person shooter video games, and Silent Hill is one of the better ones. Its creepy to play (on the PS1 in my case) and the boss levels are reasonably engaging.

I saw Resident Evil, which is a better movie, and carries the same ecological disaster theme along the lines of Andromeda Strain(Michael Chriton dudes!).

But back to the painting, more trash embedded, less fussyness (I hate motherfucking faberge eggs, let your freak flag fly

See the show "Constellation" up on 23rd street - forget the name of the gallery...
- and also, play more video games.


Its the future.

operation enduring artist said...

wod, you compared jon to alexis rockman and comended his addression of 'our' destruction of the environment. for the record mr. rockman drives an SUV...so much for his epic 'manifest destiny' and 10 years of work.

Max said...

I don't think you can dismiss an environmentally charged work of art just because an artist drives an SUV.

As a painter working in this vein, I think the hope is that you are going to effect culture through your work on a grand scale down the road. Hopefully, your work is going to be part of a shifting of the entire collective thought process of humanity toward a more harmonious way of living. Maybe that's a super idealistic way of looking at it, but that is, I think, the "point". Not that it gives you a free pass to be irresponsible, but making work that might do that is a noble pursuit, regardless of the ways that you live your life.

In most cases, you can and should separate the work from the lifestyle of the artist. When history looks back on Rockman, no one is going to care what kind of car he drove. Art takes off on a life of its own after it is made, and informs culture according to the score of history. Sure, it would be nice if all artists drove a hybrid, but it doesn't have anything to do with the art that they make. Afterall, Jane Goodall burned a bit of jet fuel getting out to the mountain gorillas she wanted to save, and Mother Theresa probably ate meat. Maybe Rockman is a bit of a nihilist and has already given up on the idea of man existing in harmony with nature (as his work suggests), but the moral aspects of his paintings are still resonant.

Max said...

Oh no the fourth wall is broken! The end is nigh!....

Just kidding, good to see you here Jon. Thanks for your thoughts.

youth--less said...

I am a middle class twit. But I don't admire other middle class twits. I admire people who talk the talk and walk the walk. Who make the committment. People who sit in trees for 3 years. and that is that.

zipthwung said...

Im in a three walled cabin. Trees, forests. Yeah. For serious.

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TOMPAC said...

for the record "globe", i know rockman pretty well, and i am pretty sure he doesn't have a drivers license, much less own an suv.

Painter said...

Hi Jon,
Thanks for coming on.
Congrats on your show.

Max said...

Hey Jon... I just read the essay on your website about your current body of work. Its really interesting. I think my favorite thing about your paintings (I too have only seen them online at this point) is the strange mix of death and rebirth that you have in your scenes, the way that the dark water becomes at once a haunted pool of decaying objects and a birth place for something magic. I love the water as well, and the way that you handle it and think about it is really resonating with me.

I don't have any questions about your work specifically (your essay really illuminated your work effectively), but I am curious as to what you think about the way art is heading right now in New York in general. Do you see a cohesive movement with all this nature painting? What do you think about it? What other artists are you excited about?

youth--less said...

Ideology wise, it's the collectors you need to worry about. Not to mention the curators and the art schools.

Mother earth, animals and artists are endangered species.
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST THE IMAGINATION ALL OTHER WARS ARE SUBSUMED IN IT

zipthwung said...

some of these paintings remind me of the hand painted photographs from fashion spreads - Pierre and Gilles for instance, although not what I was looking for preciseley-anyways if you know what Im talking about give me some names. Pruitt?

zipthwung said...

Not sure - but yeah, I think theres something to the impulse. I've noticed several artists over the years working into photographs.

Fashion mags most recently. But working into photos has a long history -tradition.

To me they are like doodles - the initial pleasure of simply marking becomes an impulse to fill in, fill out or complete. Then one starts to look at the pattern, or step back and wonder what it might "mean" or could mean given its parallel development.

Look at Al Hansen - he enlisted other people to fill out his patterns.

Related to the urge to burn things, or tool use in general.

zipthwung said...

BB - are they fields of lights on a black background? I like those - Jon would do well to look at those -

if anyone knows the name(s) of people doing dots around portraits/fashion photos -

the reason I bring it up is that the use of polymer or resin "deadens" the surface where painting over brings it back.

Reanimator.

Max said...

The separation between the sky and the water seems to be an important element in these paintings. The "Procession" (my favorite) seems to be marching downward into the water, the televisions and monitors releasing their spectral matter into the air. Using nature as a backdrop for this drama aligns the statements that are made with a sort of ineffable truth, the perpetual truth of the natural world, and also with a very emotionally strong set of principles derived from mythologies based on those natural truths.

There is an intrinsic mythic divide between the air and sea, one which has been used for centuries by people to talk about their beliefs in a spiritual sense. Although we don’t actively give much thought to these old beliefs, they are all around us, trickling down to us through the stories and schemas of our culture. I think using landscape as a scenic structure is a great way to align yourself with the spiritual litany when presenting a far reaching idea like this. I would imagine that Jon's ideas about this sort of technological life force could be presented in a number of ways (schematics, writing, comics, whatever), but doing it in the landscape setting allows us to process it through a kind of primal belief system rather than one based on rationality. Circumventing rationality helps lend the works a strong supernatural essence, which I think helps it to effect us more deeply.