HEAVY COLOR/NOTHING MUCH
BY BRIGHTWORK FELLOW CLIFF ELLIOTT

MAY 12 - MAY 26, 2018

Cliff Elliott’s prints and collages act as a means to express touchstones of personal experience and explore the question, “How does one function as an ever-changing self in an ever-changing world?”

In Heavy Color/Nothing Much, Elliot draws from a formal education in graphic design and illustration, piecing together compositions that are reminiscent of Pop-Art traditions through their use of both original and appropriated imagery. He has taken possession of images found in the cultural landscape with the intent of subverting their meaning by placing them in a new context. The resulting collages are full of contradictions, irony, meaning, and nonsense.

Elliott’s process involves the meticulous collection and cataloging of visual elements into a lexicon that is then used to construct each work. He uses a set of parameters for production that turns the process of creating the work into a potentially un-winnable game. The resulting prints, some of which have been further embellished through mixed media collage, are meant to be irreverent reminders to question how we view and digest an inherently unknowable world. 

Heavily influenced by the principles of the Fluxus movement of the 1960s, his body of work attempts to cloud the boundaries between art and life. The everyday experience is to be considered just as valuable as the artistic experience as both are simultaneously sacred and unholy.

Heavy Color/Nothing Much is an exhibition in two parts. Part I, Heavy Color located in the Center Gallery, looks outward through a series of bold, complex images that study the nature of being as it is reflected in the world around us. Part II, Nothing Much located in the Brightwork Gallery, contains an installation compiled of source material that contributed to the making of Heavy Color and is an exploration of the internal self before being influenced by the surrounding world.