Ellen Gallagher.

"I've collected archival material from black photo journals from 1939 to 1972, looking at magazines like Our World, Sepia, and Ebony. Initially I was attracted to the magazines because the wig advertisements had a grid-like structure that interested me. But as I began looking through them, the wig ads themselves had such a language to them--so worldly--that referred to other countries, La Sheba ... this sort of lost past. I started collecting the wig ads themselves. And then I realized that I also had a kind of longing for the other stories, the narratives, wanting to bring them back into the paintings and wanting the kind of chart or a map of this lost world....

"My grid (unlike the grid of the 1960s which was more mute and meant to map the work of art itself) is meant to refer to the grids of navigational charting or mapping, or to the world outside of itself. In the paintings, the grid of each page is a kind of reduction of the whole, so the parts themselves are not greater than the whole. The whole itself becomes greater than the parts, and the parts then are seemingly more simple or snapshot-like. But together, there is this kind of otherworldliness that happens when you have 396 together in concert.

"Some of the same characters appear in the grids of the DeLuxe prints as well as the paintings. One thing that the works have in common is that I think of them as built paintings. There's very little paint ever in the work. but they feel very built. The seams are important, and where the seams don't line up is all very conscious and deliberate. That's the intent--that they're built. And the grid in DeLuxe works so that each individual page exists as a separate working part. Each is a kind of coda to itself and its own drama, or its own stage.

"I would say the concept of repetition and revision, like you have in jazz or jungle music--where a conductor might ask to have a phrase played and then repeated and there's this kind of call and response between the musician and the conductor, between the DI and the audience--is central to my work. And what happens is that stackings develop between call and response. And the stackings never quite line up in the same way, so the repetition isn't ever quite a repetition."

Born

1965, Providence, RI

Education

BFA, Oberlin College, OH MFA, The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, MA

Lives and Works

New York, NY and Rotterdam, Netherlands

Media & Materials

drawing, painting, printmaking, video, collage, and mixed-media

Biography

Repetition and revision are central to Ellen Gallagher's treatment of advertisements that she appropriates from popular magazines like Ebony, Our World, and Sepia and uses in works like eXelento (2004) and DeLuxe (2004-05). Although the work has often been interpreted strictly as an examination of race, Gallagher also suggests a more formal reading with respect to materials and processes. From afar, the work appears abstract and minimal. Upon closer inspection, googly eyes, reconfigured wigs, tongues, and lips of minstrel caricatures multiply in detail. Gallagher has many influences including the sublime aesthetics of Agnes Martin's paintings as well the subtle shifts and repetitions of Gertrude Stein's writing.