Untitled (Friends)

A pair of related works on paper reveal Darrel Ellis’s interest in working across media to explore and reinterpret memory. In the photograph, which appears to have a warped surface, a group of friends pose for the camera, their faces elongated. Ellis created these effects by projecting a photographic negative onto a sculptural relief and then photographing the distortion from an oblique angle. In the graphite and watercolor drawing made from the photograph, the figures are further abstracted even as they are given a richer tone and more robust form.

Ellis became an artist at the age of seventeen and began experimenting with photography at a New York artist residency in 1979. He was inspired by family photographs taken by his late father, a portrait photographer killed by police just before Ellis’s birth. In 1981 Ellis began to use the archive of his father’s studio portraits and snapshots as his source material. His hybrid works often obscure as much as they reveal, masking faces and interrupting the gaze as they plumb the experiences of generations past. His iterative process—from photographic negative to projection and sculptural form, to rephotography as the basis for drawings—mimics the elusive quality of memory itself.