Ellen Gallagher: AxME – review by Fliss Quick

Ellen Gallagher: AxME – review by Fliss Quick

I’d never heard of Ellen Gallagher before. This definitely speaks more to my lack of education than her lack of notoriety: She’s had a significant exhibition at the Tate Modern, and this book AxME, as it turns out, is the accompanying publication for said exhibition.

The texts within this book, written by notable academics, historians and critics, are not widely accessible. My brain is now full of phraseology like ‘ironic transposition’, ‘mythopoetics and materials’ and ‘metathetic operations’. I would recommend perseverance, however, to anyone interested in deciphering the depth of these works beyond their visible wit and irony. Between them, the texts describe how Gallagher makes her work, its materiality, the themes the works meditate on, and the contextual references within them: Ellen Gallagher’s practice is to borrow a term used within the book, ‘elastic’. Her paintings, collage, sculptures and films stretch between abstraction and figuration. The works are multi-layered, thematically expansive, and weave together history and fiction. She draws on various sources from African-American popular culture, social history, literature and archival materials. Her work features a seemingly (until you read the text) eclectic cast of figures from history, amongst them Sun Ra, Rodeo cowboys, Freud and Peg Leg Bates. To borrow another word from the text, Ellen Gallagher’s world is ‘confounding’.

I am left wishing I’d seen the show (this book in hand) and with an inextricable hankering to get out the plasticine, listen to some Detroit techno and borrow Moby-Dick from the library.