Elliot Waples

Elliot Waples

Mixed Media - Multi Arts - Performance Art - Visual Art: Audio

Hanger.waples@gmail.com

Website: https://aruhanger.com

   410 N Audubon Rd., Indianapolis, IN

My art stems out of the library rather than the studio. An artist should be like a librarian collecting tools and concepts and giving people a chance to reflect with them. I did not go to art school. Instead, I created my own path in liberal studies at the New School. I turned my classes on art theory, philosophy, sociology, modernity, nationalism, and humanism into the basis for my creativity. Performance art becomes the field study of these theories in action.

The question I am left with over and over as a teacher, artist, and organizer is, “How can confusion create space for new trust to form amongst loved ones and strangers?” The tools I use to reflect upon this question with the audience are: endurance, impossible tasks, reliance on strangers, overlaying of speakers, recorded speech, interrogation, splitting the audience’s attention, and guided imagination. This has led to the following themes developing in my art: dignity, uncertainty, theft, displacement, institutional decay, secularization of religious iconography, and belonging. The purpose of reflection is often unclear. Art can feel meaningless – like searching through a vacant library of books written in an abstract language, until a stranger or friend realizes that you’re both working on the same translation. These are the moments I create art for.