LIVE WIRE

Eastern District

August 7 - 21, 2009

opening August 7, 7 - 10

BROADCASTING TOWER : A NOTE ON ELLIE PYLE

Can you be a flaneur with purpose, a hedonist with a

work ethic?

Like a radio plugged-in to the urban moment, Ellie

Pyle receives and sends--takes in and bends--signals

masquerading as images, or images as signals.  If

something catches her eye on the street—a shape, a

color, a design, a logo—she jots it down on the spot

for further consideration as subject for painting,

only half-heartedly worrying about “getting it right.”

Getting it a little wrong might interest her just as

much, that’s why.  Once that initial “jot” is returned

to the studio, it develops a life of its own, is

permitted to mutate, to claim some freedom for itself,

to collaborate with the artist in its new embodiment,

its new frame, its new potential.

An otherwise anonymous tour bus turns the corner and

Ellie sees, painted on its vast silver sides in bright

purple color, the stripes of a big cat (or the spots

of a cheetah, or the carefully plotted but dumb words

of mobile ice cream: “Kool Man,” for example). This

isn’t a bus; it’s a purple tiger! And that isn’t a

delivery van double-parked in front of a bodega; it’s

a gold zebra! The city is thronged with these half-

seen, professionally sleek or amateurishly clumsy

behemoths, these almost never remarked-upon metaphors

for power, speed, and animal intelligence.  Brands, to

be successful, must alter the frame, renegotiate the

image, make seductive their logos, their instantaneous

designs.

Ellie likes to catch them on the wing.

As a painter she doesn’t have to make things up; it

all comes to her by keeping her eyes open as she

navigates Brooklyn, strolls Manhattan, rolls

underground, happy to be in reception mode. Yes, she

could take a picture, but her concern is painting, and

that’s when the work begins.  Built-up with layers of

paint, glitter, confetti and god knows what else, her

surfaces are eloquent, her distribution of information

substantial, her touch thoroughly felt.  By the time

she’s finished with her stripes, the purple tiger is

not a purple tiger after all.  It has made the final

inter-species transformation.  It has become a

painting.  The animal intelligence is all hers, Ellie

Pyle’s. 

Geoffrey Young

23 June 09