Statements_Writing

I investigate and utilize the imagery and symbolism of technological ideology and mythology, and how these images and symbols reinforce a sense of dominance over the environment, and over the rest of humanity. In recent work, I have forced together elements of this imagery, with images of their unacceptable consequences. These are skeptical paintings, depicting mounds of old and obsolete computers and televisions rupturing the crisp, wire-frame facade of virtualesque scapes. Computers and televisions - these amalgams of plastic, heavy metals, and other toxic wastes, these transmitters of fantasy, ideology, identity, and creators of virtual worlds, are depicted as accumulating waste in the process of becoming toxic nightmares. Seen in the act of transmission, their screens are turned on to display scenes of pride and shame, glory and disgust, myth tainted with visions of that which we would wish to ignore or conceal about ourselves and our history. My goal as an artist is to expose the agents of forgetting, and to confront these mythologies, ideologies, and histories with everything that they have left out, and are continuing to leave out.

-Jon Elliott 01/08/07

...In his latest body of paintings, “Continental Drift”, Jon Elliott channels disturbingly beautiful imagery from the eye of this storm; commenting upon our current cultural landscape by exposing the dark, shadowy sub-reality that lurks just below the surface. Within these large-scale paintings, the gorgeous glossy patches, delicately gridded lines and deft depictions of outmoded technology, there seems a sense of the Uncanny, but not exactly the feeling that we’ve been there before, but rather the sense that we are there right now, here in the present. Elliott calls this a “Shadow History that runs concurrently with the commonly acknowledged present.” The artist is referring to a collective history, a history that we create in the present, culturally and politically charged, experienced en masse, throughout what we know as humanity.