Friend and colleague, Angela Ellsworth (http://www.aellsworth.com/) has been busy globe trotting these days due to an invitation by curator David Elliott to show at this year’s Sydney Biennale. For more information and an insider view of the event, you can read Tania Katan’s blog: http://oursydneybiennale.hearsight.com/. Those who know and adore Angela's partner, Tania (taniakatan.com/), will not be disappointed in her funny and irreverent glimpse at all things “Biennale”. I pulled this quote by David Elliott from her blog this morning.
Wise words.
"Contemporary art can be an expression of many things: a celebration of survival, resistance, freedom or intransigence in the face of threat, as well as of the joys and horrors of what it is to be a live. But it’s not an instruction manual or tool for life, and it will not 'tell' you anything, particularly not what you should either think or feel about it or the world. Each art work stands alone, to be appreciated as a unique experience. This is the beauty of art as well as the beauty of distance. Distance allows us to be ourselves, despite the many capacities we share. We are all the same, but different, and it is our difference that make us—according to the circumstances—beautiful, terrifying, attractive, boring, sexy, unsettling, fascinating, challenging, funny, stimulating, horrific, or even many of these all at once. All this is underlaid by our essential similarity to each other, often much greater than many care to acknowledge. More importantly, the idea of distance expresses the condition of art itself, which is to be of life, run parallel to life and sometimes to be about life. But for art to be art, it must maintain a distance from life because without this it has no authority. Art can reflect the sweetest or strongest of emotions and also represent the most threatening or traumatic events but, unlike in life, nobody gets hurt."
David Elliott, “The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age”
Angela Ellsworth
Seer Bonnet VI
15,564 pearl corsage pins and fabric
24"x11"x13"
2009
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