Building on her earlier
assemblage work, Ellen Garvens’s recent series of still lifes are constructed
with paper, simple objects, and thread in ways that play with gravity and
illusion. After moving her studio into a bedroom vacated by her adult children,
she began to play off of the dirty, pockmarked, push-pinned and taped walls,
encompassing the creative activity of the room’s prior 18 years. Garvens
considers these works to be drawings realized in three-dimensional space. In
them, photography is put into tension with sculpture and drawing, questioning
the fluctuations experienced between two and three dimensions.