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

Essay for Plague of Excess

The paintings of Jon Elliott are complex commentaries on excess and waste in our society. With somewhat ambiguous settings that appear to be on the outskirts of urban centers, Elliott is engaged in the contemporary fascination with exposing the marginal activities of international capitalism. However, unlike many examples of this trend, like Edward Burtynsky’s photos of strip mined wastelands, shipping containers, and mud flats littered with dismantled ocean ships, these paintings focus on a small subset of motifs, such as computers, televisions, and video tapes, all relating to the transmission of fantasy, ideology, and identity.

In Elliott’s recent paintings, piles of computers and televisions, mixed with the occasional oil/waste drum, populate various waterways. Rivers, bays, and open-ocean, historical avenues of commercial trade have been major substrates for the transmission of cultural ideas. They have also traditionally been inheritors of much of the waste of civilization. With the advent of the internet, computers, like television and film have become the most important transmitters of culture and fantasy in technological societies. As they become obsolete, the excessive glut of these objects spills out around the remote borders of our society, including our waterways, and those of distant societies. These waters are no longer vehicles for the transmission of culture per se, however they do still take in much of it’s wastes, and transmitting it over the rest of the world. In this way, these waters ingest and spread elements of our excessive consumerism.

Radiant, though somewhat toxic skies drip, and cast their neon color schemes over these dark and sublime waterscapes, while mysterious, undulating patterns appear like life-forms born of chemical and digital run-off. Even with their somewhat bleak subject matter, these paintings depict signs of a tenacious survival, not only of the natural world, but also of the humanity within. The lights in these cities still glow, and an occasional burst of fireworks dots the skies, showing us that these cites are alive, and these paintings do not represent a distant future. They are of the here and now, and like the pulp horror movies that begin with a toxic waste drum bouncing off the back of a truck and into a stagnant pond, sparking mutations as well as the vengeance of nature on its abusers, these patterns and forms represent life as changed, and somewhat monstrous, but certainly not dead. Elliott’s paintings are instantiations of our repressed anxieties about how we treat our environment and our bodies.

Over the last century a vast mythology has grown around computers and digital technology in general. Much of these fantasy involves the virtual sanitization of our environment, and dematerialization of our bodies. The forms and symbols of this mythology have permeated our cultural consciousness on every level. These paintings are skeptical; they rupture the crisp, wire-frame façade of this mythology. The excessive glut of old and obsolete computers and televisions - these amalgams of plastics, heavy metals, and other toxic wastes, these transmitters of fantasy, ideology, identity, and creators of virtual worlds, are depicted as accumulated waste, and are shown in the process of becoming toxic nightmares.

The success of Elliott’s recent work comes from his combination of intellectual rigor, and his use of a colorfully lush and energetic imagery. By examining these outlands of our society, a place where anything can happen, Elliott's work exposes our true nature by examining our fantasies about these areas.

-Jon Elliott '06

essay for Continental Drift

I want to stress that my work is about our current cultural landscape, and not about some apocalyptic future devoid of humanity.

This body of work presents a shadow history that runs concurrently with the commonly acknowledged present, it's imagery rising from the murky waters of cultural memory, delving into the meanings of a range of ideologically charged symbols and motifs, and not merely a moralistic narrative about abuse of environment and the humanity within.

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 visions 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 the most powerful tools we have ever created. Our imaginations have been co-opted. They feed us our fantasies (conveniently prepackaged for product identification,) they offer us alternative communities, entertain, and fill our lives with meaning. The internet has also become the largest archival source of information available, and most of us in our particular society has access to this archive. The cultural importance of these objects is obvious, and has never been questioned. What isn't as obvious about these objects, what we frequently ignore is what happens when they become garbage.

When these objects are trashed, unplugged from the network and from their cultural context, (many hundreds of thousands per year in the U.S. alone,) they do not lose any of their potency. They retain what they were as symbols, and their corporeal existence, with all of its toxic potency, makes up in symbolic power for anything lost in utilitarian purposes. When these objects have lost their utilitarian value through planned obsolescence, we dispose of them in a very particular way. Due to their status as toxic waste, we gather them, load them onto shipping containers and send them across the oceans to be recycled by people in countries that do not share our positivist technological ideology. What happens to these symbols when transposed into different cultural structures?

Many of these paintings depict piles of computers and televisions in the process of dying, adrift in limbo somewhere between positivist fantasies, and their realities as toxic corporeal bodies and environmental nightmare, and yet physically cherished bounty for hundreds of thousands of impoverished gleaners. These objects are dismantled, shattered into hundreds of parts releasing the potency of their physical toxicity, their plastic burned away revealing copper and other valuable substances, and finally discarded yet again, a process that physically alters the landscape far more powerfully then when these devices were in use creating the virtual worlds of our imagination and fantasy. Yet even in this altered state, the utopian dreams and mythology that has always been a part of these objects persists, for as Walter Benjamin wrote "...all of an objects background participates in a magical encyclopedia whose quintessence is the destiny of the object itself."

Unlike the body of work displayed last April at 31GRAND's previous location in Brooklyn, the computer and t.v. units in these recent works are seen in the act of transmission, their screens are turned on. Beyond the formal compositional improvement this development has offered, it has also allowed me to display various aspects of my research, and has challenged me to unearth imagery from the immense archive of the internet that is suggestive of my greater project, and also images that work to better communicate the intentions of each individual painting. They 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.

To reiterate, these paintings are about aspects of our world today, not about some apocalyptic fate. They are skeptical visions of our mythologies, ideologies, and histories that are mostly ignored by a progressive society trained to forget by an economy of ignorant and massive consumption, solving all problems with more consumption, rarely questioning the processes and assumptions of its culture. One of my goals as an artist is to expose the agents of forgetting, and to confront these mythologies, ideologies, and histories with that which they have left out, and are continuing to leave out. -Jon Elliott 07/27/07

Statement for "Brooklyn Painters" show

The subject matter of my paintings has tended to focus on the aspects of our society that are generally overlooked by most of us. Often the paintings have been construed as focusing on the negative aspects of society that people just don't want to confront. While those elements do exist, the paintings aren't made in a negative spirit. They are empathetic paintings, made with a social conscience, and intended to enlighten the observer to aspects of our culture which normally remain mostly hidden. This series of "overpass" paintings combines a constellation of ideas that have occupied me in my studio for the last 5 years. Criticism of the "American Dream" has always been implicit in my paintings, but I have begun highlighting my feelings along this line of thought in this body of work. While my activities in the studio are energized by social and conceptual concerns, the pleasures of surface quality, and other aspects of the act of painting have always been an inspiring force in my studio practice. I relish the process of discovery and invention that can be a daily part of the life of art.

Statement 01/10

I have multiple philosophical motivations for making paintings. I have often set myself up in the role of social critic, examining the histories of culture and the conflicts and cooperations inherent in human behavior. The way I have attempted to take on large topics such as these is to devise systems of pattern and representational symbols, and make them interact with eachother. If one thinks of culture as a pattern of ideas, beliefs and behaviors, this seems like a viable strategy. Recently I've been taking perspectival steps around and away from my established strategies and motivations for making paintings in order to examine my own role, and the role of contemporary art in general within the greater culture. And much like a project in self portraiture, some of these paintings approach the existential motivations that led me into being an artist in the first place. However, these new paintings have retained aspects of previous bodies of work, and much like many of my admired writers of short stories, I am setting up simple, experimental narratives to take on complex topics.