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