Elliott Jerome Brown Jr
Lives and works in Queens, NY, USA
Artist statement
My photographic works visualize moments of contemplation, self-possession, and intimacy. Depicted within domestic environments, pictured individuals are often obscured or located residually. While the photographs tend to be made informally, the resulting ambiguity allows the picture plane a narrative multiplicity that engages and transcends its biographical origin. The dimensional elements, in addition to the caption text, assist in situating a photograph within and alongside multiple contexts, effectively extending the initial frame of the camera. Similar to how experiences are layered in memory, I consider how a singular moment may be recontextualized to glean something comprehensive, new, or unplanned for. By privileging the interiority of individuals and communing groups, my work is invested in how people make space and less how they become clear to others. Using the pictured environment or the margins of the frame itself to reference an individual, my photographs gesture between a curiosity and refusal.
Artwork
- I know how to be brought low and I know how to abound (Six Stations), 2019. Cyanotyped fabric, nylon drawstring bag, wooden letter blocks, wooden truck, wooden jewelry case, ceramic hands, gold pens, wooden bed post, glass placard, inkjet prints, iron fireplace tools and toolset armature, ceramic elephant, and glass cube
- Sssummmmmwhhhhhhhhhhere, 2018. Lightbox print, painted aluminum, and willow
- She threatened most people off the dance floor. Fingers now laced quietly along the red countertop., 2018. Archival inkjet print
- The tire grits its teeth along the gravel and brakes to silence - a pause for effect. / Have you ever siphoned rupture through a narrow opening? / (Do you know the control it takes to slingshot a sound?), 2018. Archival inkjet print
- He gave and he gave / but he wouldn’t have given at all if I didn’t let him in,/ if I didn’t cover my body in soap three times, / swish oil between my teeth 47 minutes ahead of the time/ that I expected him / (Wounded), 2018. Archival inkjet prints on aluminum, wood (sapele), and brass wire
- Is it that I desire to see Jesus bend, to witness them at odds or in question? Jesus loves me, but I believe that Jesus is in process too, 2018. Archival inkjet print
- Sweeping the bricks to the edge of a door too heavy to stay open on its own. , 2019. Archival inkjet print
- Like a relentless fan, she would sing along, hair flounced and nails sunk deeper into her armrests whenever a note turned unanticipatedly left, then right, then upside down. In any direction, she took delight in her best effort to keep up., 2019. Archival inkjet print
- Inherent distance, 2018. Archival inkjet print
- Low tack / One corner in daddy’s living room / One corner in mommy’s living room, 2018. Archival inkjet prints in custom framing