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{"id":242247,"date":"2024-01-01T15:55:00","date_gmt":"2024-01-01T20:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/compte-rendu\/darrel-ellisregeneration\/"},"modified":"2025-10-06T12:18:23","modified_gmt":"2025-10-06T17:18:23","slug":"darrel-ellisregeneration","status":"publish","type":"compte-rendu","link":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/reviews\/darrel-ellisregeneration\/","title":{"rendered":"Darrel Ellis
Regeneration<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
How does one redress historical loss? The Bronx Museum has confronted this question in organizing the first institutional scholarly retrospective of work by Darrel Ellis (1958\u200a\u20131992), a promising young artist who died from AIDS-related complications. Presenting archival materials spanning photographic negatives, journals, and other forms of ephemera, Regeneration <\/em>paints a multi-faceted portrait of Ellis. He studied the history of Western art and wondered how to locate himself within it as a Black queer artist; he reanimated the photography practice of his father, who was murdered by the police before he was born; he was photographed by Peter Hujar and Robert Mapplethorpe, yet was uneasy about his relationship with these white gay artists. As he remarked,<\/em> \u201cI struggle to resist the frozen images of myself taken by Robert Mapplethorpe and Peter Hujar. They haunt me.\u201d In response, Ellis re-created these portraits in a variety of media to interrogate the frame of his own representation.\n<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Darrel-Ellis\"$
Darrel Ellis<\/strong>
Self-Portrait after a Photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe<\/em>, 1989.
Photo: courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Darrel-Ellis\"$
Darrel Ellis<\/strong>
Untitled (Dog)<\/em>, ca. 1987-91.
Photo : courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
More broadly, Ellis explored the technologies and forms of image reproduction. Across experiments in drawing, painting, sculpture, and photography, he revised and reiterated found images, especially photographs taken by his late father and other family members. Works depicting his sister, mother, and family gatherings underscore his concern with domestic space and familial lineage. His \u201crephotography\u201d technique consisted of projecting photographic negatives onto plaster casts that he had sculpted, thereby transforming the final image by introducing holes and other distortions. The Bronx Museum has even reproduced his workstation, a move that hints at the exhibition\u2019s centre of gravity: the theory and practice of Ellis\u2019s process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Darrel-Ellis\"$
Darrel Ellis<\/strong>
Regeneration<\/em>, exhibition view, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, 2023.
Photo: Argenis Apolinario, courtesy of The Estate of Darrel Ellis, Candice Madey, New York, & Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Encountering these endless and occasionally recalcitrant images, I experienced the exhibition as an archive of process more than the presentation of singular works meant to pass into the art-historical canon. Regeneration<\/em> does not suture Ellis\u2019s artistic legacy to one or two iconic images but instead emphasizes repetition and iteration to demonstrate how he was developing his formal vocabulary and his central themes of familial and personal history. Vitally, his artistic process elucidates an alternative relationship with the archive. In a 1991 interview with the New York Native<\/em>, he explained that his photographic process could be \u201ca metaphor for the idea of generations\u2026 the photos, they\u2019re like regeneration, regenerated, you know, from one you get many. And that\u2019s like a family. That works as a metaphor for the family.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This concept of regeneration does not mirror reproduction in its preservation of lineage or promise of futurity. Rather, it proliferates the possibilities embedded within the residuum of the past and unfolds across sideways or slanted trajectories. Ellis\u2019s notion of regeneration rhymes with approaches to the archive from Black and queer perspectives that are chary of reparative ambitions. Withholding a narrative of resolution, the show resides in more ambiguous terrain. A profound sense of melancholy and frustration suffuses Regeneration<\/em>; viewers dwell amidst the wreckage of thwarted ambitions and longings never fulfilled as a result of the (still-ongoing) AIDS epidemic. In its tribute to a prodigious young artist, perhaps the most moving gesture of Regeneration<\/em> is allowing its viewers to imagine alternative relationships with archives of loss that do not hinge upon the fantasy of repair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based in New York City, Connor Spencer is a PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is interested in queer and trans studies, critical theory, and Marxist approaches to aesthetic objects.<\/p>\n
Connor Spencer, Darrel Ellis<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Bronx Museum of the Arts,<\/strong> New York
May 24\u200a\u2013September 10, 2023<\/br>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":242246,"template":"","categories":[884],"numeros":[6774],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[923],"artistes":[6867],"thematiques":[],"type_compte-rendu":[],"class_list":["post-242247","compte-rendu","type-compte-rendu","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","numeros-110-agriculture-en","auteurs-connor-spencer-en","artistes-darrel-ellis-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/compte-rendu\/242247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/compte-rendu"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/compte-rendu"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/242246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242247"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=242247"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=242247"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=242247"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=242247"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=242247"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=242247"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=242247"},{"taxonomy":"type_compte-rendu","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_compte-rendu?post=242247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}