Spotlight Artist

Elliot Jamal Robbins

West
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Cinema/Where do I put myself, if public life’s destroyed?

Colorful abstract painting of a person standing in a textured, vibrantly painted room.

ink, Mod Podge, glitter, metallic leaf, gum wrappers, plastic gems, and metal tacks on paper

Three American types looking on

Abstract sketch of three faces with smudged features and colorful eyes on a white background.

graphite, acrylic, glitter, and metal tacks on paper

Walk-Cycle Series

Eight abstract watercolor figures in red, blue, and black, appearing to be in motion.

watercolor on paper, eight parts

Featured in New American Paintings1 / 3

Artist Statement

 My work engages with the archive of American visual culture through the act of subjunction. It projects a complex subjectivity into the pictures and moving images that are disseminated through mass media, culture, and drawing, painting, text (both written by me and appropriated), and recurrent filmic and artistic motifs as mediums for my personal storytelling. This creates a commingling of polarities, a collision between introspection and observations of the material world around me. The result of this practice is a disjointed narrative. In producing this, I reinscribe my body, specificity, contradictions, and the completeness of my lived experience into a visual field that was developed with the intention of silencing it.

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