About the exhibition
For my third outing at the Catto Gallery, I worked up a new series of drawings largely based around the idea of the remix. I love the idea that the digital toolset allows you to layer, cut, mix and edit in ways that are similar to the techniques used in contemporary music production.
As desktop computers increase in power, and by offshoring the heavyweight processing required to some FX supercomputers in Hollywood, I began to realise that I could radically alter my methods, and start to work with hundreds of individual elements, which could be pre-prepared in advance of realtime remixing sessions, in which the natural latency of the drawing process could be overcome with faster and looser compositing sessions. A technique that allows the drawings to become both more complex, and far looser, all at the same time.
I hope the vitality of this new approach shines through in pieces like EightBall and beBop. It's all about loosening the rigidity of the toolset and introducing some kind of life, some haptic making, some serendipity, into the process.
Work in situ
Lucid / RMX, new work by Chuck Elliott
Foreword by Tim Green
What is a contemporary artist to do, when advances in digital technology make it possible to ‘output’ virtually anything? Just a generation ago, visual artists were the keepers of the flame. They alone, through handwork and natural ability, could create the images that move us.
They still can, of course. Those who wish to paint and sculpt in the ‘analogue’ media remain as relevant as ever (talent permitting). But for artists intrigued by the possibilities of digital manipulation, fundamental questions remain: how much can I modify before I lose my original vision? When is a project actually finished? How much of the work is ‘me’, and how much is the software?
Chuck Elliott wrestles with these questions every day. Almost alone among contemporary British artists, he’s finding answers. Through his commitment to the cause, Chuck has evolved his own visual style and mastered a fine-tuned technical process. The result is stunning work.
It’s taken Chuck many years to reach this point. He has certainly paid his dues. He received formal training at Hornsey Art School, and later carved out a successful career in commercial design and illustration. Over twelve years he was commissioned by Yohji Yamamoto, Apple, Sony and Nike, among many others. But in 2004, Chuck took a deep breath and halted his design career in order to pursue his own creative vision, based on emerging digital media techniques.
Today, we see why. Chuck’s images dazzle the eye with their complexity. They look like nothing else out there. Why? Because he simply has great ideas. And he uses digital manipulation to push these ideas to unimaginable new places.
Those who have seen Chuck’s previous two Catto shows will be familiar with his approach. But they will detect a progression in the new collection. In part, there are technical reasons for this. The artist recently moved his image production to a facility in Los Angeles, which can process more data in each drawing – and do it faster. Giving Chuck the freedom to create physically bigger works and, significantly, to experiment more.
This has yielded pieces like Bebop 45. Here, Chuck takes one great visual idea and riffs on it, through a combination of technical trickery and old fashioned artistic experimentation. Here’s how he describes it:
“The images are ‘remixed’ in a process that takes the original data, and reworks it into a similar but more progressive new piece. In the case of the BeBop series, I created standalone images of balanced glazed volumes, and then randomly rolled a series of ‘glass spheres’ over the surface, in such a way as to make the original graphic ‘pop’. Overlaying this imagery onto new twisted 3D formers adds complexity, whilst partially obscuring the original forms... leading to dense new images that are visually intriguing.”
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Link here to read the full text ⟶
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Tim Green, January 2015
Link to exhibited works
