Clay Ellis

Peter Robertson Gallery, Edmonton, 2018

The pieces presented in the Amuse-Bouches & Mintz exhibition were selected from a body of work consisting of four distinct series, all produced over a three-year period. Work on each of the series began at approximately the same time, with no end date in mind. 

Each series, initially distinguished simply by dimension, was produced in a similar manner. Paint is applied in layers, combining separate elements pulled from a repertoire of images and forms. Some of which are in a constant state of refinement, others are reused time and time again.

The predictability of working within such a tight set of givens is almost immediately offset by the number of combinations available. Even a minor shift in the placement of a mark can change the overall character of a piece. . . jolly can turn sinister, a wave can become an obscene gesture. And with scores of pieces simultaneously on the go, the entire collection can be in a state of flux. This interconnection, when an adjustment to one piece can ripple through the entire studio, is what I work towards.

The images, or marks, used most frequently during this phase had been transcribed from drawings I had made a few years earlier, which were influenced by cartoons from the first half of the last century. The lack of constraints in the animated cartoons from that era, from storyline to the laws of physics, provided some choice pickings. 

I wasn’t interested in transferring content, but in isolating and integrating shapes or images that seemed as loaded or as ambiguous as when I had first seen them. As a child, seeing Ignatz fire a brick to the back of Krazy Kat's head and have him/her interpret it as a love letter was totally baffling . . . and totally intriguing.

— Artist Statement

The Esplanade, Medicine Hat, Alberta, 2016

“How much is enough? Born and raised on a ranch near Medicine Hat, Clay Ellis’ large, vividly coloured, and abstracted paintings and sculptures in The Third Stake continue his musings on the necessity, demands and rewards of production, whether it be the imperatives of his family’s ranching history or his own drive to create art.

The title of Ellis’ current exhibition of polychrome and resin abstract paintings and sculptures is taken from his ‘remembrance’ of Leo Tolstoy’s ‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’ (1886). In Tolstoy’s story, a peasant anxious for more land enters into a business deal that allows him as much land as he can stake off before sunset. But as the peasant deliberates on where to place his third stake, he begins to come unhinged.

Ellis’ exhibition is by no means a literal representation of Tolstoy’s story. Instead, it provides evidence of an interior state common to those for whom abstract form, not narrative figuration, best expresses our modern condition. For Ellis, this condition is conveyed through ‘images that allude to the distinct views on land use held by each of the six generations associated with the family ranch in southern Alberta.’

— Excerpted from esplanade.ca, written by Michael Turner

Peter Robertson Gallery, Edmonton, 2016

“The wordplay of Clay Ellis’ title, “Sculptures At An Exhibition”, carries more meaning than a simple reference to Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pictures At An Exhibition”. Ellis’ approach to making art is anything but simple, and extends well beyond the irony of associating his latest exhibition with the 10-movement piano piece that itself was inspired by an art exhibition.

In fact, “Sculptures” is significant because he has applied work methods developed for wall reliefs to the sculptures – both of which are included in the show. ‘Over the past four years I’ve refined a number of processes,’ he says. ‘With these pieces, it’s the first time that I was able to pull some of the marks from the wall paintings and apply them to the sculpture process.’

The “marks” he refers to are part of what he terms his “vocabulary”, and are key elements in his work. He uses the term often to describe a repertoire of recurring images that he has assembled over his 40-year career. Some elements originate from his early years growing up on a ranch near Medicine Hat and stem from the landscape and ranch life, such as the tooled leather patterns that have made their way up from Mexico, or textures of a fresh brand on a calf’s hide. ‘As soon as you start looking at those patterns and realize how abstract they are, it’s not much of a leap for me to take those images and turn them into a vocabulary that I use on a daily basis,’ he says.”

— Excerpted from a review written by Stuart Adams

The Art Gallery of Grande Prairie, Grande Prairie, Alberta, 2014

“Born and raised on a ranch in Southern Alberta, Clay Ellis explores his connection with the landscape, referring to images, the temperament and gestures of his past.

‘I think that the focus behind this exhibition is equal parts of reflecting on the experiences of growing up on the ranch, considering the reality of no longer being a part of it, and pondering what the land means to the individuals that currently live on the property.’

The transformation of the ranch itself, from homestead to ranching company, marked by the restructuring of out-buildings, the parceling of land, and the move towards automation, has happened in only a few generations.

For most operations, it is no longer necessary or practical to house a workforce, a shift that replaced hired hands and displaced extraneous family members. Usable tack turned to relic, and family members became guests to a property that had once been their home.

It is from the perspective of guest that Ellis makes his observations. While the works are informed by the changing perspectives of land use and ranching practices from one generation to the next, it has been his yearly visits over a 45-year period that have allowed him to see changes to the landscape that may escape those embedded in the rigours of the day to day.

Ellis neither condones nor prescribes ideology but rather suggests that to assess change we must first see it.”

— Excerpted from exhibition materials

While I have maintained a studio in the same city since the early ‘80s, I have produced work in many locations. I have always found adjusting to a new workspace unsettling, whether it’s an artists workshop, doing an onsite installation, a residency, or fabricating in a factory setting. Perhaps it’s because all of these events lessen the distance between the studio and the objects presented to the public. Or it may be knowing that my perceptions of what and how I produce work will change. 

Unlike the evolution of a work process which is nudged forward by nuance, a change in the work space can feel more like being pushed along in another direction.

Peter Robertson Gallery, Edmonton, 2014

“While Clay Ellis often titles his sculptural paintings after personal encounters with the ranch land of his youth in Medicine Hat, AB, a central irony is that they actually look nothing like nature. Oddly, his art reminds one of art itself, nostalgically early-wave modern.

It’s created in no straightforward, traditional fashion, either – polyurethane is stencilled, melted and painted on both translucent sides, then affixed and painted into a larger canvas. Moulds create what looks like huge squeezes of paint – another reference back to art. And Ellis doesn't even have a name for the invention – essentially a behemoth spirograph – that he uses to carve shapes and paint giant ovals on his canvas ‘skins.’

To be fair, the 58-year-old jovially says he’s not trying to impose a certain time or Alberta panorama on those who view his vibrant physical collages. Each is almost comically confident and self-contained, though this survey show has a familiar alphabet of curves, polka dots and microscopic patterns.

Led by Ellis’ clues, it’s easy to imagine farms, rivers, poultry and animal carcasses amid great canvases that at first glance look more like edible condiments enlarged under a microscope. But while his blood reds and radioactive greens are linked to his memory, this leads to a key point: despite opining that the narrative is unnecessary, Ellis will supply it as if he has just stepped out of the barn that electrified him in his youth. As with his techniques, the more you learn, the more you like.

Take the delicious Bunkhouse Wall / Weather Report, inspired by memories of painting large-scale 1970’s album covers on walls with his siblings – a nascent moment of rural graffiti that clicks with the adult’s modern street palette.

One of his least-complicated pieces, the three-foot-square Banty, beams the best of Ellis’ techniques of stencil, lace and warped plastic. Endearingly, the lumps, monochromes and allusions to feathers almost let us hear the chicken clucking in its pen. Representational? Only if you concentrate.

And his giant, six-panel opus The Last Oxbow – moved here from an installation-heavy conceptual show of video loops and steel structures earlier this year at the Art Galley of Grande Prairie – summons an impossible mash of conflicting visions: Gothic church arches and McDonald’s; a river snaking along a landscape of dried blood; the peace of lying in the hay under a blue sky.”

— Excerpted from a review written by Fish Griwkowsky, Edmonton Journal

Peter Robertson Gallery, Edmonton, 2012

“ ‘I wonder what he’s done this time,’ I say to my friend as we enter Peter Robertson Gallery. We are attending Clay Ellis’ opening reception of “simple equations, sticks, and mascot for dirty little cities.”

Ellis, an artist who is as inventive and innovative as he is a maker of eye-catching aesthetics, left me awestruck in 2009 with his polychromatic sculptures featured in Related Articles, a fusion of polished stainless steel and glossy hits of intense colour assembled to reflect the jewel tones like a mirror.

I suggest to gallery owner, Peter Robertson, that Ellis is off the charts, that his work is beyond definition.

‘There is absolutely no doubt about it,’ he nods, adding, ‘Clay is a world-class artist. He stays pretty well ahead of the curve, so it is always really interesting to see what he is coming up with.’

It is impossible to lay eyes on Ellis’ work and pull away. The colour grabs you, the marks and layers hold you. A swell of slick, glossy paint rises from the surface challenging the spatial relationship between shallow and deep space; dots and squiggles tease the eye across the plane; layer upon layer of high chroma colour, form and texture leaves one wondering, ‘How the heck did he do this?’

One second you want to poke these paintings-quasi-sculptures with your finger to see if they are wet, to see if the inflated bit is spongy; the next you are resisting an urge to peel back one of the strongly defined edges to see what’s underneath.

‘It’s little out of people’s comfort zones,’ says Robertson, ‘It’s good to push yourself a little bit because the trip is well worthwhile.’”

— Excerpted from a review written by Janice Ryan, Edmonton Journal

Peter Robertson Gallery, Edmonton, 2009

“Tucked away within one of Edmonton’s many nondescript industrial
 zones, the studio of sculptor and painter Clay Ellis sits lined with new work 
for his upcoming solo exhibition, Related Articles, at the Peter Robertson 
Gallery.

While the exterior surroundings are punctuated with greys and
 browns, inside the simple concrete building a host of multi-refractions and
 reflections of mirror-polish stainless steel gleam and glow amongst large,
elongated canvases of sharply contrasting textures, techniques, tones and
shapes.

The small polychromatic sculptures using stainless steel and polyurethane
are a play on colour. Reflecting colour back onto the contours of the steel
rather than directly applying colour onto the materiality of sculpture, these
new works deceptively play at the viewer’s spatial depth, and the 
sculpture’s own capacities to create light and shadow, down to the
 meticulous patches of 1,500-grit stencilled scuff marks that hover on certain
pieces.

Ellis’ penchant for putting one thing against each other, pulling 
information and making it all work together, down to the diverse selection of
 music in the studio, is a trait that carries over to his two-dimensional work
 as well.

At first glance, bright strips of yellow appear collaged over digitally 
printed designs of convex and concave shadows, but moving his entire body
 closer to the painting, Ellis makes it clear that everything on his canvas 
has not been digitally altered, but is in fact a product of painting.
 Citing 15th-Century Dutch painter Roger Van der Weyden’s Descent 
from the Cross as the most captivating painting in the world for him,
 Ellis deeply respects the history of his craft, but advances his medium 
through evolving and employing a variety of techniques that break ground on 
new territory in terms of aesthetics and disciplines.

As one of the province’s more prominent and established artists with
permanent works of art showing from Churchill Square to the Shaw Conference
 Centre, the 54-year-old Medicine Hat native has been one of the most 
innovative sculptors of his generation. His trademark bulbous paintings may 
have modestly began in 1996 during a collaboration with Kenneth Nolan, but
 the easy going demeanour of Ellis can also in jest contrast some of those 
offset shapes to that of a prolapsed colon.”

— Excerpted from a review by Amy Fung, Vue Weekly

APT Gallery, London, 2009

Esplanade Art Gallery, Medicine Hat, Alberta, 2005

“Ellis’s recent large-scale polychrome mixed-media installations seem to me to be his most subtle. complex works to date and among the most exciting works being made today.

His 2005 project, Eight Miles of Barbed Wire, was made to inaugurate the art galleries of the Esplanade, the new arts center in Medicine Hat, Alberta, where Ellis was born and raised, and his family has ranched for more than a century. The piece distills his profound knowledge of the history of the settlement of the Canadian prairie, including his family’s role in that history, along with his own memories of place.

The piece consists of three mysterious structures, at once buildings, temporary shelters, or stages, that provoke multiple associations without compromising their abstractness. One is tent-like, another conjures up a lush 19th century interior, while a third suggests a ramshackle shed. These enigmatic enclosures imply past or future habitation, as well as the possibility that some event is about to happen or has just happened within them. In the ‘shed,’ a neat stack of thirty two reels of barbed wire – eight miles of quarter mile reels – is animated by a video projection, now legible, now dissolving, that encapsulates elements of the region’s landscape. Another projection serves as prologue to the ambiguous structures, playing archival images of Ellis’s family, their ranch, and the region against recent footage of livestock to evoke the passage of time and create a potent, non-literal sense of place.”

— Excerpted from exhibition materials

“As his 40th birthday approached, the Canadian sculptor Clay Ellis discovered he no longer wanted to make the massive steel objects that had established his reputation in the 1990s.

These mysterious works, notable for their authoritative presence, seductive forms, and complex allusions, staked out new and personal territory for construction in metal. Ellis’s steel sculptures fused the seemingly irreconcilable traditions of modeling and additive construction as he forced recalcitrant materials, mainly industrial off-cuts and found objects, into swollen forms, employing a laborious process of joining and grinding to create suave surfaces without disguising the effort of turning steel into nuanced volumes.

The space-greedy, ambiguous sculptures that resulted were at once monoliths and constructions. Visible traces of joins reminded us that they were made through a process of addition that placed them firmly within a Modernist tradition of collage, yet they were also dense, volumetric, and aggressive in their displacement of space. And while they resisted easy explanations, they also called up a wealth of associations with architecture and place, the body, and much more: some of Ellis’s most memorable steel works seemed to reconstitute, in abstract terms, not only the mass and bulk of, say, Hindu temples, but also the voluptuousness of the entwined couples carved on the façades of those temples.

— “Clay Ellis: Mass, Time, and Memory,” 
by Karen Wilkin, used with permission

“Some time ago, I began to grasp the value of being able to write my own job description, and with that came the understanding of how absurd it would be not to be fully engaged.

Work habits changed, and over the years the range of work that I was interested in doing broadened, as well as the work I wanted to see. I was more of an omnivore than I had imagined. Being omnivorous does not necessarily mean that I feel the need to implement all that comes my way. Although the urge to experiment with new processes and materials persists, I’ve made the decision to maintain what has long been my studio practice, which is to allow work to come from work—a daisy chain of images and objects shaped by circumstance. Each new project or series of works is linked to the one preceding it, blending the refinement of process with changes in circumstance. The artifacts produced by this work method are linked through my response to the materials and process. They are distinguished by the moment in which they are made.”

—Clay Ellis, artist statement

Black & Greenberg Gallery, New York, 1994

“In their merging of pure abstraction bodily references and industrial aesthetics, Ellis’s works find their own, modest sense of balance.

And while some of the bases bear a passing resemblance to toilet seats, there is nothing vulgar about them; rather such provocation is counteracted by their smooth, almost serene, handsomeness. Call them traditional or brazen, youthful or maddeningly amorphous, his works have a very real sculptural presence that is palpable and refreshing.”

— George Melrod, Sculpture Magazine, 1995, Volume 14, number 1

“Ellis has understood the essential point: that volume itself, with its mysterious ability to depict weight and weightlessness, motion and stillness, resistance and vulnerability holds the key to expression. His shapes swell and lift in taut axial successions that are serene and highly sensual at the same time. The ‘skin’ of his sculptures is tough but tactile. Their surfaces have a quiet impersonality that lets the earthly warmth of the medium shine forth.

— Robert Taplin, “Art in America,” April 1995

Edmonton Art Gallery, Edmonton, 1993

“Art is volume not line; it is in the form of an ever-expanding mass. Art is not a linear development: when shifts happen, the line does not extend but the mass expands. New ideas or approaches do not immediately extend a line and supplant what had happened previously. Rather, they filter through the mass and the changes happen from within - an alchemical process that involves the fusing of new elements with the old.”

— Clay Ellis, artist statement

“Ellis’s newest sculpture is focused not so much on the connectedness of place and object, but on the meeting of disparate elements within the work itself, to form one object with a singular character.

His project, if any, is to synthesize these parts so they can function as an integrated and resonant whole.

Ellis’s theory is not totally in keeping with the traditional modernist view of a linear, unidirectional progression in the development of art, where things just get ‘better and better’. His own particular views on the nature of change in art production can be applied to the manner in which he makes his own sculpture. The changes come from within. In a timeless, transcendental state, that occurs in dreams and in the subconscious, there is no linear cause and effect but rather a seamless interconnectedness among disparate elements. A state such as this, Ellis believes, can be reproduced or recaptured in the making and contemplating of an art object. Nature and culture, negative and positive space, dark and light, the tangible and intangible - all are reconciled, lead turns to gold along the bridges between opposing elements.”

— Excerpted from exhibition materials written by Elizabeth Kidd, Three Alberta Sculptors - Edmonton Art Gallery