Unsupported Images
5th May - 4th June 2004


Installation view of Unsupported Images at t1+2

Tom Ellis's work is concerned with physical structures and their representation, with the conventions, parameters and mechanisms of encountering and perceiving the world about us. Employing and manipulating mundane, overly familiar objects, Ellis aims to make apparent the very act of looking itself, paradoxically achieving this through a carefully structured staging involving optical illusion and the stark physical presentation of the actual object he has chosen to represent.

Stack, courtesy of Percy Miller Gallery, London

In "Stack" a number of plastic garden chairs were arranged in a series of unequal stacks which were supported upside down on specially constructed wooden stands. The arrangement was such that the inverted feet of each stack were aligned at precisely the same height. By this inversion the stacks transformed into an optical, rather than physical event, an image captured, upside down, on the viewer's retina

For "Tank" Ellis built a rectilinear structure from MDF, assembling the piece in such a way that it appeared to be a storage tank half filled with water. The tension between the resulting illusion and the blunt physicality of the material employed is pushed to its limit point, resulting in an object that is located between optical deception and an independent physical entity in its own right.

Photograph, courtesy of Percy Miller Gallery, London

In "Photograph" Ellis presented a glazed, ceramic bowl over painted with the design of the rustic, tourist bowl on which the piece is based. By doing this Ellis retains many of the qualities that photography records par excellence, such as the way the glaze catches the light, the precise texture of the hand painted design and the overall attention to detail that is the natural preserve of the camera. The piece creates an inversion of the photograph's status as image of the material world by proposing the possibility of the material world as image of the photograph.

Tom Ellis's other recent exhibitions include a solo show at Percy Miller Gallery, London, 2003, and participation in a two-person presentation at Kontainer, Los Angeles, 2004. He also contributed to Urban Networks, installed at the Courtauld Institute, London, in 2003. Ellis is represented by Percy Miller Gallery.