"I a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made"
A.E Houseman, Last Poems, 1992.
The construction of the paintings derives form a moment I see in the urban landscape. It has to be that perfect moment when the light is just right. I take a number of references using a digital camera and I download onto a computer. I arrange compositionally the digital image so all the shapes and the colours are balanced and in place, I manipulate the image with photoshop. I then transfer to canvas the work, underpainting and drawing the image onto canvas, itself. Areas are blocked in and surfaces are built up gradually using a combination of acrylic and oil paint. For a more "plastic" 21st century surface I use acrylic. For more depth and movement I use oil. I then build further the surfaces by transparent glazing and finally seal the painting with acrylic emulsion and varnish.
"One of Gary's greatest gifts is his capacity to grasp what the culture constructs as real. His paintings are examples of the human condition; it's catastrophic outcomes are the result of being bombarded with the endless stream of TV images that encircle us 24 hours a day and these core samples derive specifically from his own psychological terrain, are points of reference of human emotion. What I see as real in his art is a living force of painting's endurance and stability for representation of our 21 St Century culture and therefore painting's inherent durability. (John Cechulski, "Fragments of Cultural Impurities": Gary Skinner Complete New Works, 2000-2001, April 2002 (ex.cat).
"What I want is to create a series of work that deals with the very notion of time. By using the video and the "slow-mo" of the remote and the flicking of channels, I was able to see this. Time became an actual material to work with and it seemed important to me to suspend it, neither going forward or backward. By distilling a frozen moment in time, I was then able to separate one idea from the other, creating disjointed narratives, with no beginning or end. The paintings suspend the moment between what is about to happen and what has happened. Somewhat like stopping a movie reel from its forward motion. "My work and particularly the ambivalent figures that populate them convey noticeably especially in the subject's eyes, a vacant and almost total unacquaintedness of us as well as his or her immediate surroundings constructed by the media culture. We are often unnerved and displaced and even uncertain in a world of our own creation. I am only interested in that moment where everything is just right, its that moment when I have found a 'subject', a crystallization occurs; a perfect representation of an idea, up to then it is an agonizing search, somewhat like looking for one clue in a forensic crime scene, that crime scene being the culture at large.
"It is also about the idea of putting the right shapes, with the right colours, in the right places, where the compositional make up is vital for the picture to be absolute, giving the viewer a shock by removing the viewer from her own specific reality. I began to perceive that there was a definite relationship between the shapes I constructed and the surroundings in which it resided in. Whether this was a colour relationship or compositional, or a combination of both. This became a beautiful experience, with the idea of expressing a world of the 21st century, that has never been more beautiful." (From an interview with Caroline Oxley, "Of Strange Collisions and Dislocated Narratives", an interview with Gary Skinner, DEBRIS, Issue No 7, July 2001, pp70-81)
In my present and future work my installations will aim to intensify the public's experience of the chosen space or provide the public with a new enriched perception of their surroundings. In this sense, the central focus of my work, will be expressed not solely through the work itself but rather through the relationships which is established between the work and the space for which it is seen and more importantly relate with the space the viewer engages with in his /her own world. It will change the way a viewer sees the world, as the signs that I am displaying in the paintings will be evident outside.
HOW TO LOCATE
VISIT ON THE WEB
ABOUT THE ARTIST
BORN:
1978 Redondo Beach, CA
Lives and works in New York City
EDUCATION:
2000 MFA, School of Art, Yale, NH, CT
1998 BFA, (with distinction), UCLA, CA
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS:
2001 Absolutely Fabulous, UPFRONT, NYC
2000 Now and Again, University Art Gallery Yale, N H, CT.
2000 Richard Ellis Complete Works, Geoffrey Harrison Gallery, NYC
1999 The Identity of self :Juxtapositions, and Non-Representations of
Cultural Identity, Geoffrey Harrison Gallery, NYC
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS:
2002 Free biennial http://www.freewords.org/biennial/artist/darkworld.html
2002 "Reactions", Exit Art, NYC
2001 Night of a Thousand Drawings Benefit Show, Artists Space Gallery, NYC
2001 Smartmarkt, Smal works Show, Patch 155 Gallery, NYC
2001 I am Not Work, A collaborative net project
2001 Scan, Brooklyn, NYC
2001 Here and Now Show, Silicon Gallery/The general store, DUMBO,Brooklyn, NYC
2001 Purloined with Guy Overfelt, Curated by Christine Y Kim, Artists Space Gallery, NYC
2001 Post card- Very small works show, Core Gallery, NYC
2000 Night of a 1000 Drawings, Artists Space Gallery, NYC
2000 45 Degrees, UPFRONT, NYC
2000 The Synchronicity of Dead Space, New York, NYC
1999 "Group Show", Gallery 2, Geoffrey Harrison Gallery, NYC.
1999 Double Bind, "MFA Thesis Exhibition Show", University Art Gallery, Yale, CT. 1
1998 Hidden agenda ,"BFA Graduation Exhibition Show", UCLA, CA
1997 School of Art, Drawing Show, UCLA, CA
AWARDS:
2000 World Wide Web Award For Excellence, http://www.artspace.2000.com
1999 The Union Grant Scholarship
MEDIA AND PUBLICATIONS:
2002 Free Biennial, http://www.freewords.org/biennial/artist/darkworld.html
2002 C:> FOrMat www.cformat.org
2002 www.kadzoo.com/Artists/Richard%20Ellis/richardellisindex.html
2001 Accepted in to the Artists Space slide File Registry
2001 A Virtual Memorial: Memorial project against the Forgetting and for Humanity,Wilfried Agricola de Cologne, www.a-virtual-memorial.org
2001 The artist and his studio, Wilfried Agricola de Cologne
2001 Metro Madness:Identity under construction, **NOW ON@
http://metromadness.com/media/feature.pho?id=20
2001 THE STAGE Un-necessary illusions writing project, http://www.futile.dezines.com/stage.html
2000 Reviewed by Caroline Oxley for Debris, "Of Strange Collissions and Dislocated Narratives-The Many Faces of Richard Ellis",Vol 7, July 20, 2000.
2000 Now and Again, MFA Graduation Catalogue School of Art,Yale, NH, CT, May .
1999 PBS, August Radio Interview
1999 Channel 1, August Television Interview
COLLECTIONS:
The Philip Goldenberg Collection
Moneyvalue Systems
Silicon Gallery, the private collection of Rick De Coyte and Michal Jane Smith
CONTACT THE ARTIST
