“Jack”, 2005
Photography
Size (cm): 103w x 75.5h x 4d
Artbank Collection
Elvis Richardson (b.1965) is an artist who works across the mediums of video, photography and sculpture. In her interdisciplinary practice Richardson is concerned with recognition and memorialisation – collecting and re-contextualising personal and mass produced objects and images in order to consider ideas ranging from success and failure to gender equality and nostalgia. Her ongoing ‘Slide Show Land’ series draws on the rich pickings from home slide and photo collections available on eBay. These works reference the lives of Dorothy and Jack Elsberry as documented by Dorothy, an amateur photographer. Retelling Jack and Dorothy’s story with the juxtaposition of found images, re-articulated in large scale prints and a video slide show, Richardson pays homage to their unconventional love story, and engages with the role of truth and fabrication in nostalgia for a couple she did not know and who, as a couple with no descendants, have their memory retained purely as ‘art’. Richardson has a Master of Fine Art from Columbia University, New York, and a Master of Art from the University of New South Wales. Gift of the artist 2016. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program.
