Elliott Elliott was born near Gastineau Channel, in Juneau, Alaska, in the first week of 1986. Since completing a BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, they have been included in exhibitions in the UK, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, Canada, and the U.S. Most recently, their work appeared in Seed Bomb at the Canadian Pavilion in Montréal and tofeelclose at aka artist run in Saskatoon. Their artist book A-I-M-E-R: was published by Peradam Group in 2012. Elliott is completed an MFA in sculpture at Concordia University in 2020. They live in Montréal with their partner, two cats and one small dog.
“What does knowledge do—the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it, the receiving again of knowledge of what one already knows? How, in short, is knowledge performative, and how best does one move among its causes and effects?”
Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
As a non-binary trans person, sometimes my actual body feels like a contest to binary norms. This propels me to seek out ways of knowing and speaking that frame knowledge and meaning as in-progress, flexible, and socially responsive. It’s a material necessity—speech traces bodies from the moment of birth (“It’s a boy!”), and social markers and norms fall in place after it. The way sets of information are accumulated, codified and circulated tell us how to know and speak, but also how to be. A lateral and malleable organization that lets us see a body of knowledge as flexible and incomplete is like what Lyn Hejinian calls an “open text.” “The ‘open text’....invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in the other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies ....that is, it resists reduction and commodification.” In my work I always come back to forms that allow me to encounter knowledge in this way, elastic and forgiving, able to accommodate differing material realities. This also allows for differentiation between the material and ideological. Imagining what knowledge is is an essential component to understanding what it does, but also what one can do with it, “how best [to] move among its causes and effects[.]”