Elisa Russell BA Art Studio & English
With my work, and with the aid of intertextual reference and appropriation, I explore cultural and psychological delineations of the self. I’m interested in combining the cathartic expression of domestic turmoil with the large-scale critique of cultural circumstance. I combine text, traditional drawings, and digital images, aiming to recontextualize mundane, low-brow, campy, or edgy imagery by placing it within an exploratory narrative of American cultural mythology. I want to combine the gross, overwhelming despair of a McCarthy novel with the absurd, halcyon comedy of a Porky Pig cartoon. The colors I use in my drawings are often bright and childish; a blunt visual mimicry of noise to offset mundane subject and contemplative language. I would say that, like most postmodern media, my work is simultaneously indulgently solipsistic, concerned with the anxieties of perception’s fallibility, and in conversation with a grander understanding of the human condition as defined by cultural circumstance.
My series of digital illustrations, Propped Up (2020), play with color and scale to simultaneously aggrandize and make comical mundane objects of comfort. By choosing to highlight items that are unremarkable, childish, or highly personalized, I draw attention to a symbolic significance that would otherwise go unnoticed. At the same time, by distorting the objects and enhancing their playful qualities, I diminish their real emotional significance. I am expressing my own skepticism towards the value of emotions in times of declination, circumventing serious discussions on illness and alienation by poking fun at object attachment.
