Ellie Wallace
By Fred Camper
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In one statement Wallace writes that she’s “not interested in glorifying the object, [but] simply knowing it well.” In another, however, she says that her goal is “to celebrate the ordinary,” writing that she feels “a connection with icon painters”–“although I do not consider the paintings themselves holy, what I put into them and what I get back out of them certainly is.” While “holy” may be too strong a word to describe the effect of her paintings, they do adhere to the rhetorical form of fine art: an object rendered with photographic realism floats above clouds, becoming a kind of spiritual presence. Wallace’s paintings of rubber bands juxtapose a single red or green loop with a large, luminous bluish white field whose depths never suggest the photographic illusions of the Renaissance but rather a shifting perceptual field: things are not what they seem.
Most of Wallace’s works depict objects found in the home of a recently deceased grandmother. She kept a whole drawerful of colored rubber bands as well as other “junk” Wallace remembers from childhood visits. “I loved it more than the toys,” she told me. “Ramona had great junk: nails, decks of playing cards, weird things like a plastic tooth from the dentist’s office.” One of the five-by-seven index cards Wallace found in her grandmother’s home became the basis of the wall-size Index Cards: actual-size paintings of an empty card arrayed in an 8-by-13 grid with lots of space between them–the whole piece is almost 17 feet wide. Though Wallace copied a single card, she varied the lines and surfaces on each to give the illusion of a large collection. Some of these variations could be due to the vagaries of printing, but others–lines that aren’t exactly parallel, for example–remind us that these are handmade copies. Similarly, the white backgrounds vary in luminosity and suggest depth. I was reminded of Chicagoan Walter Andersons (whose work Wallace doesn’t know), who meticulously paints handwritten notes or photocopies of a picture or text. Both artists interiorize and personalize the mundane, making these humble objects their own and giving them an individuated nobility.
This in fact is what I liked about Hollander’s work: it presents the materialism of mass culture in a clarified, more visible form. Re-presented in an art context, the world we’ve come to accept unthinkingly can be seen more clearly. And there’s often real humor in Hollander’s presentation: these “shrines” make a loaf of Wonder bread an object of worship, and the offerings to this “god” look more like trash than valuable gifts, reminding us of how closely our culture’s plethora of cheap products resembles a pile of garbage.
Taking the Plunge offers a pointed social critique. Here the cake layers are square and angled to the other ones, producing a cake that’s seriously askew, destroying the ascending “perfection” of a wedding cake surmounted by the perfect couple. Completing Hollander’s critique of marriage are a caption under the title warning us of the sharks that swim at the cake’s base, lone female figurines on several of the layers, and a lone woman at the top.
