Elliot Worth-Ortega

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

Elliot Worth-Ortega is a Colombian-born, New York-based artist and filmmaker whose work in film, painting, and prose is built to dislodge the viewer from their stagnant sense of normalcy, and to nudge them into the unknown. Drawing on a childhood shuttled between Bogotá, Virginia, and France, his films, comics and stories return again and again to the outsider perspective and the instability of the self — characters and narrators whose grip on identity, memory, or circumstance is never quite secure, pressing the audience to question what they had taken to be simply true. His work is made in deliberate resistance to the smoothing effects of popular culture: rather than borrowing its images or its shorthand for meaning, Elliot works to strip them away, treating the outsider's perspective not as an aesthetic but as a method for locating what lies just past the edge of the familiar.

Artwork