Elvis Richardson

Born 1965, Sydney, New South Wales

Revealing, classifying and mapping the collective memory is the creative mission of Elvis Richardson and her work takes in "revelations of institutional and private spaces, and representations of sites of violence and crime".* Diversity, in relation to both the performative act and the material found, is again the name of the game in this accumulation of levels of data and cultural detritus, the signifieds of which combine to "address notions of loss and displacement within contemporary society, whilst questioning social mores and aesthetics".* 

Found: a photograph of a thirties-something woman in a white bikini in a beach–type location, standing in front of dark green, mini–minor deluxe with surfboard racks. She eyes the camera disinterestedly – ".move over a bit so's I can get the car in" – it's high noon, perhaps the sand is hot and she wishes he (?) would get a move on. Like most snapshots it's a perversely unremarkable image, a blue–print of an original 'real' that was lost years ago, a relic/trace of an earlier decade. There is a kind of melancholy in the woman's vulnerability and anonymity, as if this was the last known photograph taken of her prior to her mysterious disappearance.

Lost: a little girl, name of Joanne Ratcliffe. Her father appeals on TV for her return and she never does. This case, like the meaning of the image, any image, can never be closed.

* From a written statement by the artist.

James Moss from his Samstag catalogue essay, The World is not Enough
 
2000 Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship
2000 MFA, Columbia University, New York, USA 
1995 Master of Art, University of New South Wales, Sydney 
1992 Bachelor of Art, University of New South Wales, Sydney 

Artist's website
http://www.elvisrichardson.com/