Amy Elkins

Bio: "Amy Elkins is a visual artist and educator based in the Bay Area. She received her BFA from School of Visual Arts and her MFA from Stanford University. She works primarily in photography and installation and has spent the past 15+ years researching, creating and exhibiting work that explores the complexities of gender, race and identity, including how they are impacted by systems of power: prisons, the military, colonization, and hierarchies built upon social constructs. Most recently Elkins' work pivots to explore her family's deeply rooted and complex history in Southern California as an 8th-generation born on Tongva/Gabrielino land in the greater Los Angeles area with the ancestral blood of both colonized and colonizer. Her approach is series-based, steeped in research and oscillates between formal, conceptual and documentary. Elkins has been exhibited and published both nationally and internationally, including at The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA; South Bend Museum of Art in South Bend IN; MSU Broad Museum in Lansing, MI; Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna; the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, AZ; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; North Carolina Museum of Art and more. Her photographs have been published in Dear Dave, EyeMazing, Financial Times, Harpers, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, New York Times, New Yorker and Vice among many others. She was recently awarded a Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship and Kala Media Arts Fellowship. Past awards include the Aperture Portfolio Prize, Peter S. Reed Foundation grant, Cadogan Award and more."

Statement: "In the spring of 2020, COVID-19 erupted and mandatory shelter-in-place orders went into effect. I found myself stuck in a 340-sq-ft apartment in a neighborhood emptying by the day. Two weeks into isolation, I turned the camera on myself. At first, I tried to shield as much of my body and face as possible. My masks, armor and props ranged from common household items—potholders, tinfoil, dish towels, bedsheets, and toilet paper— to more telling evidence of the unusual consumption that resulted from being stuck indoors indefinitely— Amazon packaging, takeout bags and trash leftover from groceries purchased while wearing rubber gloves and sterilized in whatever way was possible before consuming them. I printed these images as negatives and then as cyanotypes, a simple nineteenth-century photographic process that was feasible due to the basic materials I had on hand—an office printer, transparency film, and a package of pretreated cyanotype sheets. I rinsed them in water in a large salad bowl I was hastily sent home with when the world shut down and varying shades of blue portraits emerged. In total, I made these self-portraits for 377 consecutive days. A marathon of making with whatever lay on hand to quell my anxious body and pass the time. The days, weeks, and months in between feel like a fever dream—frayed and flickering in multitudes of blue. Every year since, I assign my students to create photographs entirely out of foraged goods. An exercise in finding inspiration, materials and creativity everywhere/anywhere."

Amy Elkins

Artworks