ELVIS RICHARDSON

Elvis Richardson (b1965 Sydney) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores modes of recognition and memorialisation through the re-valuing of ‘found’ and obsolete personal and mass-produced cultural materials. Her installation, sculptural and video works are about story telling through the traces of peoples lives using found 35mm slides, YouTube videos, trophies, home-recorded VHS cassettes, real-estate photographs, collected data and recorded interviews become the raw materials with which to reconstruct poetic stories of ambition and abandonment, public recognition and private nostalgia.Richardson’s art practice is conceptual and innovative in its response to our forever expanding access to networked information. Her methodologies of observing, collecting, organizing and editing engage with and contribute to the wider online image and data economies in contemporary culture. Elvis Richardson was awarded a Samstag Scholarship 2000 completing an MFA at Columbia University in New York in 2002. Her work has been exhibited in many key Australian contemporary art spaces and she has been actively engaged as an active artist/director/writer/curator of numerous artist run initiatives most recently DEATH BE KIND a bespoke gallery and program of curated exhibitions about art and death that included The Memorial a collaborative installation and printed catalogue with artist Claire Lambe telling the stories behind the inherited items borrowed from over 100 participants displayed within an eclectic cabinet. DEATH BE KIND’s final exhibition “the rest is silence” installed works by more than 100 artists to form a giant collection of skull art accompanied by a 120 page book – a visual catalogue of selected contemporary and historical skull art. Elvis Richardson is the author of CoUNTess an online research project that engages with the current state of contemporary art practice and provides an essential tool for understanding the arts in Australia.