Welcome to the Elbow Gallery.


 
Elbow Gallery is an artist-run curatorial project and gallery space offering solo shows featuring small-scale, collaborative and project-based artworks by emerging and established artists, both local and international.

We are interested in questioning the idea of the white cube gallery space and where art works can be shown. We do not offer answers, but the prospect of questioning the complex and sophisticated correlation between economics, social context, and aesthetics as signified in the contested space of the art gallery.

The traditional white cube art space has become systematically emblematic of where an artist makes and shows their work, in both the form of the studio and gallery space, respectively. A central concern in establishing Elbow Gallery was to eradicate the blank canvas sagacity of a gallery and create a more intimate space in both size and context where the artist can present a single work within a focused, yet ever evolving, environment.

However in abolishing the form of tradition, we seek to question how artists must construe their work in relation to the gallery space and the interwovern complexities of the art world within habitual society. With the exodus of the traditional framework of representation, the gallery is anointly symbolized by a purer connotation of art; a frame.

In doing this the gallery remains symbolic yet still offers a amenable void for the artist to interpret and stage a production in, whilst examining how this exhibitory method can effect the artists existensial concerns with their artistic creation.

Elbow Gallery seeks to question these notions by taking the gallery out of the white cube and internalizing it by placing it in a frame, and by doing so, questioning the construct of art within a frame as a sole entity. Derailing the mystification of the art world where art passes for being such, due to it’s locality in a frame, defined by archaic ideology where the frame can evoke, within an untrained observer, the untainted personification of art. The assertion of this antiquated notion is a demonic representation of a novelty that has impeached on our reality.

With this knowledge, the Frame as the Gallery is a stable structure represented by a square inch tattoo on a human elbow, which, by circumstance of the location, the artists solo show becomes a collaborative project by default. Thus we are also invariably bringing into question the curatorial process and art world economics critiquing art consumerism both literally, and metaphorically.

Is the frame, and therefore the person who wears it as much of the piece as the artist; Should he simply be the foundation of the exhibit as the white cube represents, where the viewer can look past the frame and judge the show on the exhibiting artistrs work? Or does he encompass the entirety of the show, embodying both the gallery and therefore the exhibition.  In essence becoming more than the work, a meta narrative representing the infinite structure of the abyss, a canvas unto himself where the show simly exists and the artist as author becomes inconsequesntal, an abandoned dialect of a greater sequential design.

With this the artist is confronted with the arduouis task of placing a work within the inch squared gallery that essentially needs to override the cubed walls, breaking the arbitrary mythology and eradicating the dormant facsimile of abstract realization we assert through cliché ridden society.

The uncanny, vibrant, profilic nature of the Elbow Gallery is delighted to offer this opportunity for artists to exhibit work which attempts to overcome these obstacles in order to prove itself as a piece of art in its own right, garnering some significanc out of this arbitrary madness fuelled by the current economic climate and offer the viewer a structural theorization to dissect, anylize and question the convulescent notion of art imitating life, imitating art.