Whitney Biennial 2019
May 17–Oct 27, 2019
Janiva Ellis
17
Floor 5
Born 1987 in Oakland, CA
Lives in Brooklyn, NY, and Los Angeles, CA
In her paintings, Janiva Ellis makes pointed use of humor, repurposing imagery from popular media and art that informed her youth, appropriating animated characters that often represent underlying tension in her paintings’ narratives. In the foreground of the hybrid landscape presented in the Biennial, a mysterious scene unfolds in which a graphically rendered figure guards a morphing cartoon that is carefully blended together from multiple applications of paint. Simultaneously projecting determination, amusement, and stress, the forms are exaggerated yet dwarfed by the vastness of the landscape. While the characters are not bound together by an explicit narrative, their relationship to one another becomes an engine of intrigue. It also serves as a complex point of entry to the monumental landscape, which is executed in brilliant colors and with vivid attention to the materiality of paint, creating a distinctive backdrop.
Uh Oh, Look Who Got Wet, 2019
Installation view of the Whitney Biennial 2019 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, May 17-September 22, 2019). Janiva Ellis, Uh Oh, Look Who Got Wet, 2019. Photograph by Ron Amstutz
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Janiva Ellis
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Jane Panetta: This monumental painting by Janiva Ellis in many ways is really dominated by the landscape. It's not a rendering of any single landscape, it's really this kind of hybrid landscape and I think she uses that backdrop to kind of heighten the ambiguity that then plays out with the figures. The figures you see in the painting, you don't quite know what they're feeling, you don't know where they're going, you don't quite know what the narrative is. There's definitely tension playing out I think, and that's also something she augments through the landscape. There are these very foreboding clouds at the top of the landscape, and even the sort of strangeness of it I think lends an unsettled quality to the painting in general.
Narrator: In the figures, Ellis echoes her approach to landscape—their elements seem to have been pulled from a number of different places. One large figure lies across the ground.
Jane Panetta: You don't know quite what's going on. Is the figure sleeping? Is the figure thinking? Then, in the center of the composition, there's what looks like a female figure kind of striding forward that feels very dynamic and is really the centerpiece of the painting. But again there's a real ambiguity to, are they running, are they fearful, what's playing out there? And then they're holding what looks like a baby that's again painted quite differently and I think Ellis is always interested in the different ways you can paint a figure within a single composition. That it can have a cartoonish element, it can seem like a more figurative naturalistic body, and that they can also be painted at all these different scales within this single composition.