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Cass Elliott A glass that folds something in the summertime, 2015 Mixed textiles, Oil, and Canvas 36″ X 48″

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Cass Elliott Untitled (Climb in and bring me with you), 2015 Mixed textiles, Thread, and Oil on Canvas 18″ X 24″

Cass Elliott Untitled, 2015 Oil on Canvas Overlaid with Stretched Textiles 24″ X 30″

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Cass Elliott Untitled, 2015 Oil on Textile (rose pink mesh) 

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Cass Elliott Untitled, 2015 Printed Mixed Paper, Textiles, and Guash on Stretcher   20” X 30”

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Cass Elliott Untitled (Homme: drawings from the next morning), 2015 Pencil and Pencil Crayons on Paper Series of 11” x 14”  

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Cass Elliott #unrealizedProject, 2014 Thermal Printer Rigged using Raspberry Pi and Desk Library Mezzanine Gallery ECUAD (Solo Show)

In this work inspired by Hans Ulrich Obrist’s “Manifesto for the future” I have configured a printer running on a Raspberry Pi. By automatically accessing the ECUAD wireless network to scan all Twitter status updates containing the hashtag #unrealizedProject, the device thermally prints on receipt paper the content of those tweets. This interactive printer continues to document these anonymously tweeted unrealized projects within a minute of them being published online. In doing so, it will urgently record the remembrance of roads not taken, projects not realized, and ideas not brought to fruition.

“I see unrealized projects as the most important unreported stories in the art world. As Henri Bergson showed, actual realization is only one possibility surrounded by many others that merit close attention.There are many amazing unrealized projects out there, forgotten projects, misunderstood projects, lost projects, desk-drawer projects, realizable projects, poetic-utopian dream constructs, unrealizable projects, partially realized projects, censored projects, and so on. It seems urgent to remember certain roads not taken, and—in an active and dynamic, rather than nostalgic or melancholic way—transform some of them into propositions or possibilities for the future.”

The documentation itself is ephemeral as the printing mechanism is non additive (i.e. uses heat not ink) serving as metaphor to the unreachable space between ideas which have been made manifest and ideas that may not have. #unrealizedProject speaks to my personal interest in documentation, the unknowable, the forgotten, the possible, the remembered, and the alternate.  serve as both an artistic tool for documentation as well as a resource from which to consider new artworks. By contesting the division between the realm of memory, experience, and the possible future, #unrelaizedProject serves as both a tool for documentation and a resource from which to consider new artworks.  

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“For every planned project that is carried out, hundreds of other proposals by artists, architects, designers, scientists, and other practitioners around the world stay unrealized and invisible to the public” -Hans Ulrich Obrist

#unrealizedProject

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We are tag Contemporary - Professionally committed and invested in presenting contemporary art by advanced students working within diverse practices. The gallery acts as an inclusive space for experimentation, performance and discourse between peers and members of the community.

tag was formed and operated by Cass Elliott, Brooke McDonald, and Kai Chofour in 2014/2015 and later operated and curated by Cass Elliott and Brooke McDonald. 

To date the gallery has had 13 exhibitions.

 For more information see the link below. If you would like to request images from previous shows please do so. 

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1034650276560445/

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Cass Elliott Your friends, his vase, my painting, 2015 Watercolour and Ink on Linen 16” X 18”

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Cass Elliott & Brooke McDonald Installation Shots: Painting Forum, 2015 Oil on Canvas, Oil on Phonebook Paper

*see video

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Cass Elliott & Brooke McDonald Collaborative Show “Painting Forum”, 2014 Emily Carr University Library Mezzanine Gallery 

March 2nd - March 14th

Continuing with an interest in gesture, abstraction, and the making of paintings Cass Elliott and Brooke McDonald will present a series of site-specific work using the studio, and the casual arrangements held within it, as a starting point. Together they focus on strong gestures that point to the physicality of painting. Mainly, they are paintings that focus on the process of painting instead of the final, finished work. They are about the back and forth, the continuous dialogue and experimentations with paint. Painting Forum is intended to act as an access point for viewers to consider contemporary painting and the tropes associated with it.

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Curator: Cass Elliott Installation Shots: “It Could Have Been…” February 2015 Charles H Scott Concourse Gallery ECUAD, Essay by Areum Kim

Republished at : http://www.woopublication.ca/blog/2015/2/12/it-could-have-been-a-walk-with-areum-kim

"It Could Have Been..." A Walk with Areum Kim     FEBRUARY 12, 2015

What strikes me when I hear the phrase, it could have been…, is a sort of automatic antipathy at its bitterness, resentfulness, regret, almost a taboo-like status: self-help guidebooks’ biggest no-no, never waste time on what could have been. In fact, it rubs against the motto of contemporary world driven by productivity and profit-making. To ask “what could have been,” is only a wistful thought, a mental idleness. It won’t propel you towards success any sooner. But at the basis of this question lays rejection. Rejection of the now. Today could be better. It dreams a better version of present and future. Artists assume the position of defunct historians who fail in the task to neatly organize the past; who painstakingly tunes into the past, yet not too keen on delivering the correct version. Who instead tells could-have-been’s. It should not have been, it could have been, it would have been.

However, the other axis of this regret is also a hope for a new world. And this very thing starts from looking to the past. In fact, Walter Benjamin proposes: The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again […] To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was.” It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.

Here I can identify two things at stake. One is that the images of the past are powerful as a recognizable tool; this recognition, in the form of nostalgia, is “the tool of the ruling classes” to retain and continue traditional forms of dominance. Nostalgia causes inertia, swinging the forwarding force back to the comfort of familiarity. Two is question of how “moment of danger,” a moment that equates to the image-flashing instant, can be initiated. Walking through this exhibition, I can locate both moments of seizing this image, and of initiating the moment of danger.

Familiarity

In Mitchel Kenworthy’s Picasso in Bombay series, viewers can immediately spot the allusion to Picasso and the early modernist movement as a whole, and the only visible “ingenuity” of the artist is the proposed geographic marker, Bombay, a place that did not pertain to European modernist movement. We fall back on familiarity as the first enemy at the same time a tool. We question its expiry date, validity, and how to use it at our disposal. Thus, using faces: walking by the large paintings by Christelle Agahozo one perceives shrouds of faces; multiple generic faces, countless portraits elapsed in one surface. Or effacement of the face, Atefeh Baradaran severing the front part of the casted heads. Erasure of the face, as a both violent and homogenizing force that recall the feared dystopian literature of the 80s and 90s, and its somewhat gruelling realization in today’s world. And a familiar face appears again, in Jessica Molcan’s Portrait Paintings on Canvas and Nylon, a literal figuration of memory; how a face gets lost in one’s memory, and only the effect of the lost image gets transposed into pigment and its application. This ambiguous face is familiar to all who buries a face in deep memory. The future ruin still retains recognizable images, Shannon Cowe’s collages project the surreal, somewhat doomed future—and perhaps it is because they are solely built on the past signs and objects, images. This is Cowe’s attempt to link inner utopias to outer spaces, and viewers are unsure if they are internal or external landscapes. nowhen collective’s (Sauha Lee and Jenn Pearson) dream machine is also trying to reach an internal plateau, the dream machine starts by the memorial imprint it leaves on our eyelids, which quickly propels into summoning monsters of the unconscious.

If past must appear as image, we need the instantiation of that flash. Bifurcation of today —as it simultaneously transposes into immediate past—a disruption, projecting an alternative now, forking into infinite possibilities. Arielle White comes upon a branch that has broken off a tree, interrupts its course, and decides to sustain its existence in a newly imagined environment. It is not an effort to elongate the severed branch’s life, but to insert a parenthesis, pausing its cycle before its new life (as it is put back to its natural context and continues the cycle of ecology and immortality). The cycle of matter is paused, and it decays a little differently, under different gazes. This opening up parenthesis in a continuation of whatever that has been flowing.A mirror breaks a flow in space, by hailing/jumping/disrupting the continuous flow of space, by reflecting in it, an unusual space. A mirror is a first step in heterotopia; perceiving one’s own image by locating oneself not here but there, in the virtual space of the mirror. Mirror 2 enables the photographic image, the structure of which Graeme Wahn exposes, rather than the product of the structure, usually regarded as the image. Wahn could be proposing the image is the blue, unexposed photo paper, or the mirror that reflects the space, or the structure itself as it is seen by the eye (another image making machine). Thus he contests the visual notion of the image. Opening up multiple worlds, by choices, by sheer expectation. Leo Lin’s series of objects in a black plinth sets up situations for mental and visual reflection and affirmation. A viewer is invited to send text messages to the phone inside the vitrine, and sees the exact message show up on the screen a few seconds later, creating an interval between expectation and affirmation. Cass Elliott’s #unrealizedProjects heeds respect to possible worlds that could be opened up once we go back to unrealized, forgotten projects. On the desk, a thermal printer scans all Twitter status updates containing the hashtag #unrealizedProject. The tweets are printed on the receipt paper which itself is schedule to disappear.

Truth

All these varying attempts amounts to the search for truth. It is an earnest task. Not a perfecting truth that sums up perception or literature of history into one agreement. But it is more like Will Dege’s drawn manifestations of conspiracy theories, which, though they sound manic, delusional, over-proven, are a rejection of what is told; an active rearrangement of what was told through religious institutions, media, documentaries, educational apparatuses. Conspiracy theory search for “honest version” of historical narratives. Dege's drawings unbiasedly digest hysterical stereotype of conspiracy theories, and becoming a place where we could also unlearn de facto institutional knowledge. And, ending with a song, an honesty to oneself: …to erode all my disasters it’s a good day…Taking pieces of songs written at a young age Kai Choufour’s It’s a good day re-issues his music as new representations delineated by text and blocks of colour. His song has imagined sound, this sound fills the entire wall with the MS Word-produced images. This song is a single from an unrealized album and is the first single in a part of a bigger compilation. We enter a sphere of confession of one’s dreams, desires, selfhood.

                                                                                                                          Areum Kim

** More images available upon request

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Cass Elliott Untitled ,  2014 Oil on Canvas 18”X 24”

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Cass Elliott When you close your eyes and think ahead (Homme),  2014 Oil on Canvas, Guash Painted textiles  Variable sizes

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Cass Elliott Untitled, 2014 Stretched Nylon and Oil on canvas 12” X 14”

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Cass Elliott Untitled, 2014 Oil on Canvas 8” X 12”

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Cass Elliott Untitled, 2014 Guash and Watercolour on Mixed Textiles, Oil on Canvas Variable sizes