A Monument to Now - Elliot Collins

Northart is excited to host a solo exhibition of compelling New Zealand artist Elliot Collins.

Elliot Collins is an artist who works across an interdisciplinary range of media. Elliot is interested in ideas of the absent text within Memorials in Aotearoa New Zealand as well as the motifs that represent a particular kind of Identity forming narrative. My practice draws reference to poetry, language, naming, access or boundaries and memorials towards death.

Elliot’s show, A Monument to Now, attempts to address the idea of recording now in a way that upholds hope yet throws a knowing shadow upon all of us. The complicit, the victim, the winner, the authority, the lost, are all contained on the same continuum.

The works are a comment on the overuse and overt abuse of images and narratives that perpetuate problematic ideas. The point to these works is to understand how power and knowledge works. I’ve given you less, I have taken the detail and recognisable elements away and left the viewer with mere suggestion of colour palette contained in the original. Via a simple digital manipulation I have achieved a silencing that has occurred for many indigenous people throughout time. The story is still there, I have still given you something to look at, a presence of something that exists in an absence of everything else.

“It is my hope that this show will encourage the visitors to think of their own monuments to now. Their own markers of time that they may be able to return to or remember that will preserve for them the special moment that is now.”

Opening event 3 pm on Sunday 2nd of August, then show runs Tuesday - Sunday 10am to 4pm until 2nd of September, see Northart's Facebook page for more details.

Image details: Elliot Collins, And We Went Outside, Oil on Canvas, 2020. 1525mm x 1010mm.