Janiva Ellis “Fear Corroded Ape” at Carpenter Center, Cambridge

The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts is pleased to present new work by Janiva Ellis (b.1987) in the exhibition “Fear Corroded Ape,” on view January 31 to April 6, 2025. Ellis reconfigures a broad array of imagery from art historical portraiture and landscape conventions, animation, and popular culture into dissonant scenes. By turns explicit and obscuring, her paintings narrativize white existentialist mythology alongside social degradations and the brutal, nuanced structural forces that enable their denial. Dexterously employing a broad range of techniques and motifs, Ellis operates beyond the mere exposure of these forces to further manipulate their sentimental resonances, revealing the desires inherent to cultural canonization.
In preparing for her exhibition at the Carpenter Center, Ellis reengaged with paintings that had remained unfinishable in her studio for years, floating in and out of her consciousness. Representing a unique kind of “new” commission, this series of long-duration works includes some intended for previous exhibitions or others held back for myriad inchoate reasons. The artist has called these “dust bunny ideas”—hard-to-resolve paintings that settle into corners of her studio to be continuously reworked, with long breaks in between. As a result, much has changed in the world during their long gestation. Fear Corroded Ape, therefore, asks what it means to assemble a group of “unresolvable” images. What is it about these images that are obdurate, resistant to resolution, too much or too little—or too something—to communicate within an intended series of works? Furthermore, how will they be resolved, or remain unfinished, for this exhibition and beyond?

In her recent works, Ellis has excavated historic architectures and landscape as sites of modern ruin, all imbued with cultural myths and violence. Amid hues of gray and brown debris, seemingly recognizable characters hover over crevices and fragments, unfinished passages that function beyond abstraction or as portals to other worlds. Here viewers witness a contemporary moment of falling empires and epistemologies often fronted by shining symbols. This is an aesthetics of aspiration becoming failure, providing a kind of forensics that reveals how Western painting has glorified moments of violence as art history. Ellis’s work thus intervenes at the junction of destruction and creation by showing the medium’s ability to conceal, for example, the institution of whiteness as a quasiheroic yet insidious specter inside of image-making. Ellis demonstrates how mythologies, once created, may be destroyed or fractured and refracted into newly estranged elements and arrangements. In moments where the dust never quite settles, each painting moves beyond the weight of finality, embracing possibility within uncertainty and precarity.

at Carpenter Center, Cambridge
until April 6, 2025