If you read this week’s Arts and Entertainment feature on Good Weather Gallery, you are probably wanting to know a little bit more about the show opening tomorrow, Oct. 22: Elliott Earls’ “Death of a Salesman.”
Earls is a graduate from and artist-in-residence at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield, Mich., and is designer and performer as well as an artist. He created has created original type designs (see one below), his posters in the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and in 1999 won an Emerging Artist grant from the Wooster Group in Manhattan. That’s a lot of cred for a guy doing an art show in a garage in North Little Rock (but the A&E feature story will explain).
As you can see in the video above, the show consists of Cyclopsian figures (like Puck did to Bottom, Earls has given them donkey’s ears), two dimensional works incorporating some of his type faces, and what might be “neocubist” homages to Francis Bacon.
Here is what Earls says about his show at Good Weather:
Death of a Salesman is a crash of exhaustion with internal combustion at play. In a continued indictment on nihilism, Elliott Earls (the eccentric, exuberant, brash, and sometimes perverse savant) has mutated/muted his surrealist imagery into a wall of familial heraldry and a room of oddities and otherworldly forms. The iconography in this work possesses a solipsistic eye flanked by large attentive ears. The cyclops as a symbol of brute strength and power is a misfit. More relevant is his nature as a shepherd and his ancestral lineage as the son of Earth (Gaia) and Sky (Uranus); an analogy for the ineffable experience of fatherhood’s influence on the work and Earls’ relentless drive to behold this alien sentience.
A reception is 6-8 p.m. at the gallery, 4400 Edgemere Road in North Little Rock.