Brooklyn, New York
Contact: elindveit@aol.com
My work is a quest to create a believable epidermis. In building skins of bark out of paint, paper, burlap, pencil, and sawdust, I am exploring the personification of surface via the petri dish of Sylva. The entropic heraldry that abounds in bark speaks of health, history, age, and mutation, and its innate corporeal underpinnings are a metaphor to the human condition. By use of invention and scale exaggeration, I am putting a magnifying glass on some of what I find beautiful, mysterious, and pertinent in the waking world through the window of my subconscious. These works evidence my curiosity about the notion of what is real but they are not, however, intended as science.
The “Sylvan Natural History of New York” are part of a growing vocabulary of smaller dimensional paintings. They exist on modular panels that can be combined to present a great deal of visual information and evoke displays of early anatomical wax models such as those from the collections of Museo La Specola, Florence, and The Mutter Museum, Philadelphia. They’re inspired by an exhaustive series of hand colored books started in 1842 titled “The Natural History of New York”, a thirty volume, fifty – year attempt to depict all things flora and fauna in the state of New York via fantastic and often hand colored illustrations.
The “Parade Shields” are larger works built on articulated box springs, singles and doubles, that sit on steel mounts 6 to 18 inches from the wall like blown up sylvan potato chips. The title refers to ceremonial objects from the 15th and 16th centuries, like Andrea del Castagno’s shield “David with the Head of Goliath”, that were carried in pageants, civic processions, and spectacles. Usually made of wood, painted, and even carved in relief, some shields, like Castagno’s David, may have been used as symbolic protection from enemies, while others celebrated noblemen’s enthusiasm for classical antiquity and mimicked Ancient Roman triumphae. Art is a parade of ideas, perceptions, and symbols that affords the makers some degree of protection from their own demons and exhibits tribal self-identification.
