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BRANTLEY ELLZEY BIOGRAPHY STATEMENT RESUME ARCHIVE
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TRUE RELIGION STATEMENT |
The idea for "TRUE RELIGION: Sacred and Profane" came from my thoughts on religion and its role in our culture. What place does religion have in a consumer driven world? How does theology coexist within a marketplace that promotes images and products that challenge Christian values? Living and working in Memphis, TN, I see the intrusion of religion into nearly every aspect of life. Memphis, sometimes referred to as the “buckle of the Bible belt”, is a place where an organization isn’t just an organization but a “ministry.” Prayer is viewed as a rational way of fighting crime. At the same time, hip hop artists whose work at times flies in the face of religious piety, are given keys to the city. This collection is influenced by my years of practice as an architect specializing in the design of religious architecture and furnishings. A recent trip to Italy provided further inspiration for the forms and iconography of the pieces. “Obama," for example, is based on the tondo form popularized by Botticelli in the fifteenth century. Paper in and of itself is a disposable, inexpensive material. It is only when it is given meaning through composition, editing and printing that we value or devalue it as an object. Is a Bible more sacred than a magazine? Does the worship of celebrities find any commonality in the worship of Christ and the saints? Is it Madonna or Madonna? |
ARTIST STATEMENT |
I am fascinated by the idea of individual units creating a larger whole – the threads that make the cloth, the bricks that build the wall – and the layers of meaning that these relationships create. As a child growing up in Osceola, Arkansas, I saw books and magazines as my gateway to the outside world. I was especially drawn to magazines – glossies filled with thought-provoking text and beautiful images that combined to create a single, cohesive object. I was always reluctant to part with my magazines and collected stacks and stacks of them. I loved not only the content but also the beauty and order of the stacked volumes. My small town also provided inspiration in the person of an itinerant craftswoman who created wastepaper baskets from empty ice cream buckets sheathed in the rolled pages of magazines. I first used rolled pages as a decorative surface for several furniture design. As I rolled random pages for these pieces, I realized that each one encased the very specific content of a magazine, with the resulting piece forming a kind of time capsule of information. This notion continues to inform my current work. I choose books and magazines to comment on a specific theme, rolling their pages and arranging them in structural combinations. The resulting objects not only have a thematic, artistic form but also are infused with information. The intensive, time- consuming process is directly analogous to the painstaking jobs performed by thousands of people in the publishing industry – jobs that produce a paper object, rich in content, that in most cases becomes nothing more than the castoff of a commerce driven world. My work honors the disposable paper object by transferring its value from a dependence on content to its existence as an artistic form – commenting as well on the passage of printed media in an increasingly digital age. As an architect, I create spaces that are carefully planned and constructed, influencing the user and acting as a backdrop for life’s experiences. Over time, these places become filled with meaning and memory. Similarly, my art is about the making of meticulously constructed structures that influence the viewer and elicit a quality of memory. What was this object before? What is it now? What information is contained within?
-Ellzey, 2010 |
