WHITE ELEPHANTS

The concept of White Elephants comes from an old practice in South East Asia where an elephant would given as a way to spite the recipient by ruining them with the burden of cost the animal would require. This body of work explores this idea by using early cinema film stills to point to the uselessness and cost of the industry outweighing the benefit that it provides. By removing the characters from their original context I work to remove their intended purpose. I use gesso as a sculptural material to block off the faces to further remove them from their context or identification. Turing these iconic gestures into isolated specimens for examination of visual tropes and the language they have created.