Tealia Ellis-Ritter
Artist Statement:
After moving to an affluent community, I found myself an outsider in a town where I knew no one. This created in me a heightened awareness of how I looked and how people looked at me. I began to experience a conscious and constant feeling of
being on display.
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The Live Creature images are the result of my desire to explore this notion of display, in both a physical and emotional sense. Stylistically, the images are inspired by Renaissance portrait paintings, which convey a sense of the sitter as part of a tableau created to be examined. I sought out to have a “formal experience” with my subjects, in which we come together for the expressed purpose of creating an image. In this process, we both experience the sensation of viewing and being viewed. There exists a conscious uncertainty, as the subject studies my movements and I in turn study theirs.
The title “The Live Creature and Ethereal Things” originates in philosopher John Dewey’s text Art as Experience, in which Dewey defines “the experience” as a process that “continues until a mutual adaptation of the self and the object emerges…the interaction of the two constitutes the total experience that is had, and the close which completes it is the institution of a felt harmony”.
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