Elicser Elliott: Neglected Nostalgia

Black Artists’ Networks In Dialogue (BAND) Gallery & Cultural Centre

Elicser Elliott, Jo, 2024. Acrylic on panel board, 24″ x 36″

Elicser Elliott: Neglected Nostalgia

Curated by Nehal El-Hadi
June 20 – July 27, 2024
BAND Gallery, 401 Richmond Street West, Suite LL108, Toronto
Partner: RBC

In Elliott’s paintings, time and place collapse into each other, exploding, eliding, and combining in the unexpected ways that memory works. It draws connections, overlays emotions and generates relationships where before none existed. Memory assigns importance using unknowable values, constructing meaning through disparate transpositions. Elliott’s storied configurations, in turn, transmute memories into something larger, something identity-defining, with each re-imagining and re-telling.

In this exhibition, memory interacts with truth and fiction, fact and emotion. The works address the desires for belonging that inform nostalgia: for places, people, communities, ways of being. In one vignette, a girl-child perches Gulliver-like atop a shack while other figures contract to Lilliputian scale. A man looms large and friendly over a building. A family sits on a beach, the mother protectively holding on to a child on her lap. Angular and architectural buildings overlay a sense of perspective with the natural environment present in essence.

Elliott’s work reminds its audience that nothing is left behind — everything we have experienced continues to inform and re-shape who we are in the present, at disproportionate scales. Within his stories lies an invitation to tend to our own histories, memories and nostalgias.

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Elicser Elliott, Mr. and Mrs. Blah Blah at Miami Beach, Barbados, 2024. Acrylic and oil stick on panel board, 24″ x 36″

About the Artist

Elicser Elliott is a Toronto based multimedia artist who has been making his mark in building Toronto’s street art scene. Since graduating from Sheridan College’s animation program, he has amassed a vast collection of murals and graffiti works that adorn streets, sidewalks, and buildings across Toronto and further abroad in Central and South America and South Africa. Elicser Elliott explores narrative structures, new surfaces, and new sensations, through the lens of more than a decade spent in the global street art community. He describes his work as highly improvised collages of soft characters and organic shapes, layered and blended through transparencies. Inspirations for his characters often stem from his own past relationships and experiences. Coupled with drawing likenesses from passersby on the street, he combines the two to bring his community-based murals to life.

About the Curator

Nehal El-Hadi investigates the relationships between the body (racialised, gendered), place (urban, virtual), and technology (internet, health). She completed a Ph.D. in Planning at UofT, where her research examined the relationships between user-generated content and everyday public urban life. As a scholar, her hybrid digital/material research methods are informed by her training and experience as a science and environmental journalist. Nehal advocates for the responsible, accountable, and ethical treatment of user-generated content in the fields of journalism, planning, and healthcare. Her writing has appeared in academic journals, general scholarship publications, literary magazines, and several anthologies and edited collections. Nehal is the Science+Technology Editor at The Conversation Canada, an academic news site, and Editor-in-Chief of Studio Magazine, a biannual print publication dedicated to contemporary Canadian craft and design. She currently holds a residency at Toronto’s Theatre Centre, where she is developing a live arts event that explores surveillance, privacy, and consent.

Elicser Elliott, Ramon, 2024. Acrylic and oil stick on panel board, 24″ x 36″

Also on View & Upcoming Exhibitions:

Leone McComas: Everything will fade, these three remain:
June 7, 2024 – August 31, 2024
BAND Offsite | Public Art Installation
355 Adelaide Street West, Toronto
Partners: LiUNA & Fengate

Chiedza Pasipanodya: Dura | a mechanism for recalling sensibilities of community care (from any and all satellite sites such as this)
July 19, 2024 – May 25, 2025
BAND Offsite | Public Art Installation
Garrison Commons, Fort York, Toronto
Partners: City of Toronto & TFVA

Dura | a mechanism for recalling sensibilities of community care (from any and all satellite sites such as this) is a public installation that manifests Chiedza Pasipanodya’s research-based practice, centered on southern African ways of being, ways of knowing, and aesthetics. Dura will be a structural interpretation of a Ndau communal granary. The Ndau are an ethnic group inhabiting areas of south-eastern Zimbabwe and considered one of the first ancestral tribes of the Nguni; Bantu-speaking ethnic groups in southern Africa. In constructing Dura, Pasipanodya meditates on the questions of Kenyan guerrilla theorist Neema Githere: “How are we alchemizing our displacement? How are we activating the past, to put the present in motion towards the future?”

Audra Townsend: Solo Exhibition
Curated by Karen Carter
August 15, 2024 – September 15, 2024
BAND Gallery, Toronto

Jamie Ellis Pasquale: Solo Exhibition
Curated by Joséphine Denis
September 26, 2024 – November 3, 2024
BAND Gallery, Toronto

Black Artists’ Networks In Dialogue (BAND) Gallery

Black Artists’ Networks in Dialogue (BAND) Gallery and Cultural Centre is a charitable organization dedicated to supporting, documenting and showcasing the artistic and cultural contributions of Black artists and cultural workers in Canada and internationally.

Our core programming includes:
Early-career Artist Exhibitions which focus on the professional development of visual artists. Artists are able to show a body of work with the assistance of the Gallery, grow their understanding of the exhibition process, and build connections in the art world.

Live Arts presentations which provide opportunities for both emerging and established artists to showcase their work in an intimate performance space and experiment with arts presentation ideas.

And In Dialogue at BAND, this encompasses workshops, presentations, and speaking events at BAND intended to encourage skill sharing and dialogue among artists, cultural workers and the larger community.

BAND Gallery
Temporary Address
401 Richmond Street West, Suite LL108
Toronto, ON M5V 3A8
www.bandgallery.com
info@bandgallery.com
(647) 701-4323

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Black Artists’ Networks In Dialogue (BAND) Gallery is fully accessible. For more information, visit www.bandgallery.com/visit