I love music so much that some years ago I started learning electronics, going on to work at CoffmanLabs building amazing valve-state HiFi systems. I bought some spare parts that weren’t going to be used and started making my own hot-rodded versions, functional objets d’art. Electrically this is basically a stripped down Prautes 50L6 headphone amp, where I made a few internal design changes and this chassis… the pattern is done in pure gold (as in “actual” gold), based on a photo I took of a ceiling in the Alcazar in Sevilla, Spain. The controls are on the back so it’s possible to see more art, and the front panel is a mandala designed by a 16th century Italian philosopher. The amp also lights up :D. Although nominally only a ~3W headphone amp, I use it to drive 99dB efficient speakers quite capably….
Architecture and Construction by Sapata Fofana-Dura and Santigie Fofana-Dura; electronics by George Lee, Zeal Mayfield, and me; concept and painting by me. Composed of about 1200 bricks cut from wood salvaged from multiple sources, including a from house fire, The Shrine of Humility was made to exist for only three months of 2019, and is now no more. The unsuspecting, possibly reluctant supplicant would enter the shrine alone and be cast into darkness, enduring this for some time, when at last they are granted a vision.
The relevance of any undertaking can only ever be proportional to its purposiveness.
The Shrine of Humility, or ANIMVS·SVMMISSVS is a reaction to the affronts to consciousness and dignity we face in a world of ever greater depersonalization and isolation. Technology has allowed us to consume more than what we could ever hope to actually assimilate, more than what our own native sensorial metabolic rate can sustain, whether speaking about the merely material, or sensation, or thoughts and ideas. It’s expected that we will consume many hundreds of images and impressions in any single minute of any day, a single image only commanding perhaps at most some few seconds of direct attention. In this way, impressions and thoughts remain only the constituent parts of unformed ideas, and may then never go on to ever being anything more than assumptions which cannot be consciously attended to, where no inquiry is possible. This sort of overloading of the faculties induces a psychological state of passivity, somnambulance, confusion, and purposelessness. Life is thus proportionally less lived.
What if we were to have an image which is only seen by one observer, in a liminal space, for longer than a few seconds, yet perhaps only for as long as any reasonable directed attention might last, knowing that the image is not extant elsewhere in any form and that sharing the experience is not possible. Neither artist nor viewers are looking for “followers” because there is no association of images to be had. And the image may only ever be experienced once. The purpose of this exercise is to remind us that this is in fact always the nature of any experience: an image that can be seen by only one observer does not possess an objective reality— objective experiences are the varying attempts to share what is ineffable, observed as a functional state by any present consciousness. Only you know for sure what you have seen, and of course even that is impossible.
Take back your Subjective Truth because it is the only Truth. Here is a humble shrine where we hope you may find a moment of illumination and awakening.
For further elaboration on these ideas and how this relates to the message of the Encyclical theme, please see the accompanying project monograph.
“…An abundance of lush imagery that draws upon multiple themes, from Aristotelian philosophy to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The paintings are painstakingly produced and filled with a technical excellence that does not rely on creative cliches. The artist riffs on themes of occultism, eroticism and sacred geometry in a show that is exciting and countercultural. […] Wall’s artwork is carnal, lyrical, original and uplifting. His subject matter is in distinct contrast to that of some of the safer art venues around town… it’s well worth a visit if your aesthetic interests expand beyond the traditional.”
“The wild card of the bunch is Elliott Wall…. His standout piece in the Insolitus show is Lyre Plyre… [he] twists the woman’s locks into an up-do that is part Cleopatra and part 1920s flapper encased in a baroque glass frame – so ersatz rococo it would be at home in a Tijuana watering hole or at least a self-consciously hip dive bar.”
“Wall follows the nineteenth century convention for figure studies involving a nude female, in which the model is portrayed as the guise of some classical goddess or mythic maiden…. The challenge to realist painting from photography, dating from the late nineteenth century, fades today in comparison with the mimetic capacity of digital technology to create and manipulate high-definition, 3-D imagery. Perhaps the only effective response can be found in the work on view in Insolitus, one which is marked, in the approach of all three artists, by an overriding sense of creative control and an underlying concern for poetic import.”
“…Portland, Oregon, artist Elliott Wall’s No One Wants To See This explores sexuality and mortality with postmodern appropriation and esoteric references… a complex and provocative work.”
“Skill comes into play in a fashion that reaches for the sublime… The ambiguous conjunction of elements here is unsettling in its marriage of allure, eroticism, religion and incantation, all the more so because Wall’s technical agility… is utterly frictionless, almost luxurious.”
Little Bird: “Which emerging artist do you think more people should know about?”
Andy Paiko: “Elliot Wall, a Portland, OR painter and evil genius.”
[To contextualize this amazing remark, he is only pointing out the very true fact that “evil” is a relative term, and that I am simply not as virtuous or excellent as he is — E]
