Buck Ellison joins PAC LA on the day his new book, Living Trust received the First PhotoBook Prize from the 2020 Paris Photo — Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards. Ellison’s work is currently featured in the fifth iteration of the Hammer Museum’s biennial Made in L.A. 2020: A Version . His large format photographs examine white privilege and how it is broadcast and sustained. Buck is here in conversation with his London gallerist, Will Jarvis from The Sunday Painter.
Buck Ellison received a BA in German literature from Columbia University, New York, in 2010, and an MFA from the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, in 2014. Borrowing from the language of stock photography, Ellison produces meticulously detailed images that examine white American wealth. His large-format photographs portraying Ivy League students, WASP dynasties, and affluent homes are inspired by seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, specifically family portraits, that display an intricate set of coded signifiers and a particular attention to detail. Overall his tableaux showcase, in vivid detail, the mechanisms that quietly, even politely, obscure inequality in America. Ellison has exhibited his work at Balice Hertling, Paris (2019, 2017); Carl Kostyàl, Malmö, Sweden (2019); The Sunday Painter, London (2019); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2018); Index—The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm (2016); Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio (2016); and Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main (2014).
Will Jarvis is a co-founder and Director of the South London gallery The Sunday Painter. Established in 2009, The Sunday Painter started as an artist-run project space for showing the work of friends and peers and become a commercial gallery in 2014. The gallery’s origins are reflected in its commitment to running an artist-first space and cultivating a program that continually confronts, questions, and evolves with itself and the world around it.
Image: (Cropped) Buck Ellison, Dick and Betsy, The Ritz-Carlton, Dallas, Texas, 1984, 2019