Trans(de)substantiation

Elliott Engles, MFA 2024, Painting

The figure is a representational formula and an object to be coveted, the subject of a one-way gaze that acts as a vessel for the viewer’s projection.   The body, on the other hand, is a permeable, mutable, semi-corporeal-something, which is contextualized by the space it finds itself in and it’s relationality to everything. The leaky body is open and malleable to the pressures, penetration, and perception of the external world, while simultaneously seeping onto all that which encounters it.  The complex ways in which we all navigate public and private spaces open our bodies up to constant mingling of breaths, the residual heat of someone’s buttocks on their recently vacated seat – creating an alliance with the architecture, technology, and ecology of the surroundings. Within it all, the system of gazes, directed outward from the body and toward the body, is constantly surveilling, recalibrating, penetrating, and ingesting in order to produce a hybrid being. 

In my thesis show, Trans(de)substantiation, I have made paintings and drawings as a way to highlight the ways in which I conceptualize the body, not as an impenetrable object, but as a leaking, fluid, unstable entity that rubs off on its environment and absorbs things from its surroundings. Through drawing with ink, paint, collage, and assemblage, I build images of bodies that exist in multiplicities, ingesting their environment, internalizing technology and ideology, and assimilating identity  – becoming Frankensteinian aberrations, cyborgs, bioterrorist gender assemblages.  These bodily iterations most often manifest in my paintings as the figure of the Angel, an eternal and ever-undone-becoming being of incomprehensibility, expanding and collapsing into infinite repetitions.  The angels in my work are not the angels of art history and of pop-culture, instead relating to the seraphim, terrible wheels, and living creatures of the holy books and apocrypha – beings of questionable corporeality full of eyes before and behind and shining as burnished brass, flying with still wings that do not disturb the air.  

My work is situated alongside the post-modern project that rejects the impenetrable figure, and instead acknowledges and destigmatizes the leaky and penetrable body. Referencing and appropriating depictions of the figures that populate the art historical landscape, ranging from pre-enlightenment painting to the contemporary porn, I defile their uprightness, and reconfigure them into new modalities of relation.  With colors that oscillate between toxic sludge and tender flesh, I build images with various types of paint, ink, collage, and assemblage, applied with urgent and painterly brush strokes and frantic scribbles. These marks become records/instructions/theorizations of the ways in which the body-barrier can become transgressed, and in fact already is transgressed, challenging the modern conceptualization of our impenetrable and sequestered pure self.