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
- CAC
- 217 N Carpenter St.
- Chicago, IL
BOLT Program Artist In Residence
(Lying In Wait to Return)
The human world is made of stories, not people. The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed. 1
The Ryou-Un Maru, a huge Japanese ship, a squid boat that lit up the surrounding waters with bright lights, broke free of its moorings during a tsunami in 2011. Vanishing in the storm, it was declared lost, only to appear two years later off the coast of Alaska, having made its way across the Pacific without a crew. Many maritime cultures tell stories of ghost ships, manned by the dead, drifting in the fog. This was a real-life ghost ship. Floating out of the recent past, it became tangible again after it was forgotten. Even then it proved to be somehow out of reach. Salvage efforts failed. Unclaimable in international waters, it was forcibly sunk, essentially de-reified, returning it to the underworld of human narrative—just another strange story, or a footnote in the annals of law. Objects, whether large or small, seem far more stable, more substantial, more self-possessed, than the stories humans tell and live by—heavy things born of the material world, not just floating through it on the winds of language and thought. But this isn’t always the case, or at least it’s not so simple.
When we speak of ghost stories we usually mean stories about ghosts. Spencer Elias' latest exhibition suggests the need for another definition, stemming from the observation that a story itself can be a ghost of sorts, a sovereign force with its own power and a spectral agency. A story can possess an object, shadowing it, seeping in, until it can’t be extracted. A story can move unencumbered across space and time, even lying in wait for years before coming back in a form of eternal return. Shaped from nothing, fiction is propelled into the world, where it takes on weight, where it grows powerful.
Consider a portrait of the artist as a young man: at the age of eighteen, Spencer Elias invents a character based on someone he knows—an improvised way to save face with a teacher. The imagined man dies and occasions a funeral, while the real man, the model for this fictional person, lives on. It is entirely unexpected then, years later, when the real man starts dying as foretold in the lie. One cancer occasions another, a cunning echo taking form. In other cases, fiction is known to be a powerful thing. Two thousand years ago, in ancient China, a future emperor, Gaozu, told of an alligator that slept with his mother in a dream and thus conceived him—a divine impregnation on a dark riverbank. Or it could simply be a myth that hid a more shameful family history, we’ll never know. Either way, the chimera served its purpose, bestowing power, while the tale itself lives on with an inhuman longevity.
This exhibition is woven through with narratives like this, and yet they emerge mostly through cryptic objects and images. The artist offers stories in various transformed or mediated states, signifiers drawn from the living world but further obscured or oddly enlivened. We know such things can carry stories with them, narratives suggested or implied, but they can’t be read like words on a page; these narrative-objects or object-narratives are more tenuous, if still insistent transmitters. And together the disparate elements hum with the promise of interconnection. Where does meaning lie here? In a single object? In the constellation? In the circuit between one element and the next? In the reflection on a photograph’s surface? Meaning sleeps like the spider at the center of the web, or perhaps the web itself lies sleeping. Either way, we can’t know where the spider began; the web’s anchors are numerous, and to touch any thread is to send a shiver through it all, edge to edge.
In Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus, the poetry of the underworld emanates from a car radio. The film’s protagonist leans close to the dashboard, waiting for the next mysterious dispatch. Elias also has us bending down to listen to a radio, only there isn’t a message coming through; his emits only an atmosphere of not-quite-empty fuzz. One radio appears in the exhibition; a second, we’re told, is located elsewhere in the city. The two devices are tuned to the same signal, but they are also linked across time and across an even greater distance. These handsets were produced by the same company—only one was made in Japan, the other in China twenty years later. They, too, are part of a story, much larger than the modest objects and stretching beyond the bounds of a single mind. Left on a psychic riverbank, we might glimpse the dream forms of signs like so many alligators. Or we track the unmoored narratives like ghost ships into an indifferent sea, where their afterlife may be as vital as any living beings we know. There we try to salvage them, or we sink them, casting the elusive things back into the deep.
-Karsten Lund
1. David Mitchell, Ghostwritten, New York: Knopf Doubleday, 378.
2. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 112-114.
All quotes are from this passage.