Tuesday, February 11, 2025 12pm to 5pm
About this Event
24 Quincy Street, Cambridge MA 02138
https://carpenter.center/exhibitions/janiva-ellisJanuary 31–April 6, 2025
In preparing for her exhibition at the Carpenter Center, Janiva Ellis reengaged with paintings that had remained unfinishable in her studio for years, floating in and out of her consciousness. The artist has called these “dust bunny ideas”—hard-to-resolve paintings that settle into corners of her studio to be continuously reworked, with long breaks in between. As a result, much has changed in the world during their long gestation. Fear Corroded Ape asks what it means to assemble a group of “unresolvable” images.
Ellis reconfigures a broad array of imagery from art historical portraiture and landscape conventions, animation, and popular culture into dissonant scenes. By turns explicit and obscuring, her paintings narrativize white existentialist mythology alongside social degradations and the brutal, nuanced forces that enable their denial. Employing a broad range of techniques and motifs, Ellis operates beyond the mere exposure of these forces, manipulating their sentimental resonances to reveal the desires inherent in cultural canonization.