Spencer EliasAbout
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Smith College
Artist Talk
Departemnt of Visual Arts 
2023

Contango Journal
Issue #3: Crime
Designed and Printed in Chicago, IL
Available at The Graham Foundation + The New Museum  

Screening of Canine Unit 341
4.19.2017
Harvard Film Archive
24 Quincy St, Cambridge, MA 02138
Curated by Kiyoto Koseki

​The Emperor Is Naked
Curated by Iben Bach Elmstrøm
Showing works by Annesofie Sandal (Copenhagen, DK), Spencer Elias and Lucas Briffa (Chicago, IL), artists duo Hesselholdt and Mejlvang (Copenhagen, DK), Ana Hansa-Ogren (Milwaukee, WI) and Tia-Simone Gardner (Minneapolis, MN).

​WorkRoom
2205 California ST NE #605
Minneapolis 
Mar 3rd - Mar 25th, 2017

The Emperor Has No Clothes
Annesofie Sandal, Ana Hansa-Ogren, Hesselholdt & Mejlvang, Spencer Elias and Lucas Briffa
Curated by Iben Bach Elmstrøm
Ski Club Milwaukee
3172 North Bremen Street
Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53212

​The project is supported by The Danish Arts Foundation

​Acts 12: 6-9
Lucas Briffa, Spencer Elias
Laura (Chicago)
1535 N Ashland Ave, Chicago, IL 60622

​It Was a Low-lying Foglike Floating
Curated by Ian Breidenbach
TSA - Philadelphia 
319A North 11th St #2H

​June 5 - June 28
Opening Reception: Friday, June 5, 2015, 6-10 pm

WUT MAG
interview

Paul Makris
Chicago Artists Coalition - Bolt Residency Exhibition Space
217 N Carpenter St., Chicago, IL 60607 
Friday, May 1 to Thursday, May 21
Opening Reception: Friday, May 1, 6-9 PM

FRONTROOM 
Opening Reception: Sunday, May 3, 6-9 PM
1839 W Thomas St.
Apt. 3
Chicago, IL
60622
by appointment

Transforming Accessory
Benjamin Barretto, Clare Grill, and Spencer Elias
LVL3 Gallery
1542 N Milwaukee Ave, Chicago, IL 60622


​Prismatic Nature
Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, IL
Acts 12: 6-9An Exhibition by Lucas Briffa and Spencer Elias
Laura Proejcts, Chicago

"During all the late summer and throughout the autumn there could daily be seen moving along the road skirting the cliffs above the sea a strange procession of passengerless streetcars swaying against the skyline. The residents in this area soon learned what was going on. And though the cliffs were patrolled day and night, little groups of people contrived to thread their way unseen between the rocks and would toss flowers into the open trailers as the cars went by. And in the warm darkness of the summer nights the cars could be heard clanking on their way, laden with flowers and corpses."

-Albert Camus, The Plague

"Problem: a group of related incidents or an ongoing situation that concerns a significant portion of those who live or work in a particular area."

-Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS)

Posters, curtains, sketches and comic books, television, tee shirts and opened mail: These artifacts are the echoes of private routines, like those found in a teenage bedroom left unoccupied. The decorations still in place, a space that is personalized yet no longer warm, filled with comforts but bringing unease instead. 

A poster pasted to the wall articulates identity in the bedroom, a confrontational display of musical taste or political affiliation. Revisited, its continued presence prods you with twinges of embarrassment: a malformed self-image of a past time.

Hand sketches animate an apprehension of a dreamt hero, while others in comic books wade through crooked worlds waging vigilante justice to save a culture under attack.

Snapshots show forbidden yet playful activities among friends, memories of small defiances in parking lots and suburban streets – horsing around outside of the codes of institutional authority.

The pencil of the police artist flips the freedom to let one’s mind wander upside-down, a daydream given resolution to be apprehended and stalked down, a death threat.

This is a place of habits, a place of stubborn ways and an echo of oneself that is uncomfortably familiar but hard to shed.

​ — Zachary Postone
Canine Unit 341
    2017 | 00:10:40 | United States | Czech (Eng Subs) | Color
    Stereo | 16:9

    Generously made possible by: 
    The Edes Foundation
Harvard Film Archive


    "One of us, product of a vast genetic mixture, is
    called ‘purebred.’ One of us, equally a product of
    names designates a different radical discourse, and
    we,both inherit their consequences in our flesh.”

    -Donna Haraway



    "He told the hound where he wanted to go.
    'jump off me and go through this stone wall,
    There is a garden behind the wall, 
    in that garden the Bird of Light is sitting in a goldenm cage.'
    'Why should I take the Bird of Light without the cage?'
    You might have slept for ever if I had not been there.”

    - Tsarevitch Ivan, the Firebird and the Gray Wolf 
    Collected in Aleksandr Nikolaevic Afanasev’s Народные Русские Сказки,1855
 
Blanche on the Lam
  • A visual Index of Wikipedia articles edited anonymously by the New York City Police Department 

Availible at  Printed Matter,  Inc,  The Graham Foundation , and the New York Public Library