Elliott Linwood INSTEAD

I think the title of the show, Instead, serves as a statement about the work because most of the recent images were made as a self-soothing meditation on the passage of time so I wouldn’t be completely swept away and consumed by the pain, sadness and fear of watching my partner slowly died of cancer this past year- as a way to appreciate the depth and quality of the time we were able to share during this period.  After all, we are always doing one thing instead of something else.


Lessons in Survival

Elliott Linwood-
December 2004
 
Whether things are looking up or not, depends on your perspective, or where you stand at any given moment.  Assembling the snippets toward a cohesive outlook becomes the trick.
 
For example, in Sequel, snapshots taken of a Times Square billboard are arranged as images of twin towers, then multiplied again to reflect how popular culture codifies and deploys spectacles of yearning and fear.  In glancing skyward at a steaming ad for “Cup O’ Soup,” it’s hard to avoid the long shadow that the events of September 11th cast upon our shared visual culture.   Although it’s a catchy image of a recognizably cheap unit of sustenance, on the one hand, our fascination with how the wisps of steam unfurl betrays other fascination with transubstantiation, or the magic whenever one substance perceptually becomes another.
 
A similar strategy of replacement is reworked in Cupboard, a series of pictures taken in San Francisco. Unlike hermetically sealed Warhol multiples of commodities, the serialization of a cup of coffee here reveals some of the dangers involved in grafting images onto the social environment.  Tethered to the scaffold and each other, the workers’ interdependency is precariously scaled against the visual drama of a fresh perked stimulant.
 
Sundial, taken recently at the Sundial Bridge in Reading, California, however, registers at eye-level.  The cinematic quality of light in this image, which pits the speed of the revolution of the sun against a running boy playing shadow games, renders how fleeting our designs upon nature may seem, when compared to the permanence of will in attempting to do so.

 

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