Elliott Mickleburgh

The preference not to […]

In a world driven by constant exposure to images and the arrays of communications media that write, store, and distribute this information, it is easy to become afflicted by the idea that there is nothing around us, no thought or object, that cannot be sensibly expressed through the technologies of convenience that rest under our fingertips and extend all the way to the horizon of the visual field. This affliction is much like the philosophical aphorism stating that the boundaries of the world are constructed by the limits of human language and thought.

Rather than assuming that communication suspends information in a perpetual state of accessibility, Mickleburgh’s work provides accounts of those images that are not fully manifested into the cogent universes of the visible and the thinkable. Chromakey hues, photographic latency, and gestural abstraction are all used to allude to images that are excitedly tracing lines of flight across contingent processes of becoming. In 1971, Bas Jan Ader filmed himself crying but became so besieged by his melancholy that his tears went unexplained. Likewise, the very opportunity to divulge information through creating art is simultaneously rendered in these works as an opportunity to conceal and transform something else.

Mickleburgh’s latest project, XX.XX.XX, is an interpretation of the annunciation executed through the photographic, sculptural, and textual ephemera that circulate through the organs of corporations during the pre-production stage of designing fashion advertisements. By linking religious devotion with the consumption of luxury under the conditions of late capital, Mickleburgh seeks to cultivate a space in which a desire for the spiritually ineffable is instigated and sated through the cultural circuitries of couture and advertising.