Elle Gillette (born in 1995) is a multimedia artist based in New York. She holds her BA in Animation from the University of the West of England and is recently studying an MFA in Fine Arts at Pratt Institute. She works from printmaking, installation, video, performance to sound, websites, and digital media. Elle likes technology, and her works often present the relationship of the interaction between herself with AI and computers.
I was born in 1995. And, that particular timeframe was the shift from analog to digital technology. The beginning of the end of an era. I want to explore the dichotomy between the contemporary notion of growing social connection and the longstanding isolation that is apparent in contemporary human interaction with the rise of the internet. People are looking at screens more than surfaces like paper, canvas, and fabric, which evoke human touch. While technology continues to expand, analogue processes diminish. The virtual replaces the material. Dissociation is abundant. I sometimes feel alien to everything that is familiar, so I investigate the world around me in a language that is familiar to me: my objects.
Trauma has been stored in my family's genes since the Civil War. My father served in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
I have a hard time integrating the past and present because of this intergenerational trauma. I exist between the two.
I work in a range of materials as I try to understand the subtle shifts in my trauma determined reality. The depiction of real objects juxtaposed with digital images helps align the tension between the actual memory and the traumatic memory.
By using already existing images or icons, juxtaposed with drawn images, fragments of quotes, or text I draw attention to iconography that initially may be dismissed. I aim to create underlying commentary or semiotics from these images. I use a lot of degraded, or “replicated” imagery because I believe that technology, when viewed through the internet, or on web-based platform creates a disconnect from the objective reality of the world around us. So anything that's been run through the web or through technology is changed from its original form. Information is abundant- but how can we decipher what is truly real?
For me, the best way to convey a message is to create a body of work that can be seen both in real space and posted online into cyberspace—a process of replication. Combining printmaking, an ancient practice marked by tradition and replication, with kinetics, computing, and technology is the essence of my practice.