Athens, Ga. – Renowned designer, performance artist, and filmmaker Elliott Earls will spend the week of Oct. 15-19 at the University of Georgia. His Athens residency will include a lecture, performance, student workshop, and an exhibition at the Lamar Dodd School of Art Main Gallery.
Earls first gained international recognition as a designer of digital typography in the 1990s and expanded his practice to include one-person performances utilizing interactive technology of his own design, earning a prestigious Emerging Artist Grant from The Wooster Group in New York. In 1995, Earls formed the Apollo Program, a studio devoted to experimentation with nonlinear digital video, spoken word poetry, music composition and design. Earls’ work has been shown in exhibitions and festivals around the world, and is featured in the permanent collection of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution.
In 2001, Earls was appointed designer-in-residence and head of the 2-D Design Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. While at Cranbrook his artistic practice has continued to broaden by using film production as a method to generate digital photography, sculpture, paintings, and the music of his band, The Venomous Sons of Jonah. Earls’ UGA workshop will be structured around the creation of a scene from his current feature length film project, The Saranay Motel.
Earls will deliver a public lecture on Tuesday, Oct. 16, at 5:30 p.m. in room 102 of the Student Learning Center. Using his own work as a springboard for discussion, Earls will highlight the critical and timely relevance of the work of the avant-garde German artist John Heartfield, and his own approach to integrating performance, music, objects, and graphics into a unified and cohesive body of work.
On the evening of Thursday, Oct. 18, Earls will perform at Ciné in downtown Athens. He will perform live in two sets beginning at 8 p.m. and screen his digital films throughout the evening. The week-long residency will conclude with an opening reception for his exhibition in the Main Gallery of the Lamar Dodd School of Art on Friday, Oct. 19 from 6 – 8 p.m. The exhibition will remain on view until Dec. 17.
The Elliott Earls Residency is supported by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, Lamar Dodd School of Art Visiting Artist and Scholar Series, Lamar Dodd School of Art Galleries, Department of Theatre and Film Studies, Ideas for Creative Exploration, and Ciné. All campus events are free and open to the public. Tickets for the Oct. 18 performances are $5 (or $2 with student ID) and the film screenings are free. Tickets may be purchased in advance at the Ciné box office or by calling 706/353-3343. For more information about Earls, visit www.theapolloprogram.com.