My artistic practice involves producing and gathering objects, performing repetitive actions, and staging sparse installations that obscure intention and meditate on the ordinary. At first, works appear as spotlit refuse, such as a stained piece of paper; but upon further inspection, one finds that the stains create a complex composition with a painterly sensibility. It’s this experience of discovering something more within seemingly empty vessels that my work is situated in.

Notions of mark making are another integral aspect of the work: a line as understanding/connecting/tracing/imagining. And in mark making, I create circumstances in which I try to remove my hand as much as possible and allow for chance to dictate form. I’m interested in the meanings that can be pulled from moments of turbulence when applied to subtle installation strategies.

Creating subtle, dispersed installations allows for focused, intimate encounters with the work. When installing individual pieces, I try to create a matrix of undulating sight lines and linkages. This simulates a complexity within the openness. Moments of visual rhyming between objects are foregrounded. This approach is inspired by the experience of noticing arbitrary details while going for a walk, such as a tear in a leaf or a reflection in a puddle. Likewise, I attempt to create an artificial, imaginable environment to be discovered within each installation.

The materials that make up each piece draw on a sense of fragility; either by their very nature or after being subverted. A 0.5” x 10’ steel rod, a building material used for its strength and structure, is bent at multiple points, rendering it vulnerable as it precariously leans against the wall. A small, creased up, and dirtied piece of newsprint paper features a heavy-handed abstract drawing in charcoal with subtractive, fingerprint-type impressions made on its surface. Not only is the charcoal ephemeral by nature, but the paper it is drawn onto is among the most fragile. I exacerbate this trait in the materials in order to consider how it defines the human experience, and its inescapability.

elijahdenker@gmail.com /// @elijahdenker