Artist Biography:
Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. (b. 1993) is a conceptual photographer working on ideas related to intimacy, domestic space, and marginality. Brown’s work has been featured in exhibitions at Platform Gallery, Baltimore, Galerie AMU, Prague, Forum Art Space, Purchase, NY, Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, and Polifórum Digital Morelia, Michoacan, Mexico. Brown was a participant in the New York Times Portfolio Review (2016) and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2017). He received his BFA in Photography from the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Statement:
Constructed as singular moments in ongoing narratives, my work functions as a documented abstraction of daily life. I am interested in the limitations of photography, specifically in what is omitted from what is included in the image; what information is compromised, and to what effect, in the distance between the image and the viewer? Using the pictured environment, objects within the space, or the margins of the frame itself to disguise or reference an individual, my photographs encourage imaginative speculation, while denying accurate explanations. In this way they become a prime space for curiosity and refusal. As the pictured individuals identities are often obscured, my images are less concerned with representing any one person as it is the theoretical implications of power and access. Moving the imaged person between a series of occlusions and reveals, I leave space for the individual to challenge the viewers categorization, maintaining that the imaged person belongs to themselves. I capture a person in a place of comfort, rooting the bizarre or glamorous into a moment that feels lived in. Set within biographical, private, and public spaces, my work visualizes the ways in which environment and inhabitant live within one another.
Artist website: http://www.elliottbrownjr.com/