Rope/Blindfold, 2019.
A rope looped like a conveyor belt with two knots in the center sits atop a floor diagram. As a visual piece, the diagram can be read and understood as a sliding scale of control in a conversation. As an interactive or performative work, two participants may don a blindfold and sit in the circles at the end of the diagram. When one person talks, they gently pull the rope towards themselves, and let the rope be pulled when their partner talks. Feeling a knot touch their hands means that the knot points at one of the far extremes of the diagram, showing an imbalance in the conversation. |
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Social Magnetism, 2019.
Gallery visitors were invited to take a magnet wrapped in black cloth and tie it around their knee so that it hung above their ankle. Walking throughout the gallery, one's magnet might collide with another's, causing a temporary linked connection and prompting cooperative communication amidst looking at/participating within other works in the galley. |
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Word Pact, 2019.
Word Pact is a dialogic piece in which two participants each choose five important words to their daily life. Using a performative ceremony, they trade words for ten days and are not allowed to say their own important words in exchange for saying their partner's. |
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Please Leave the Performance, 2018.
In this work, Josh Elston sat in a dimly lit room with two circular platforms before him. He toyed with and moved around plaster objects on the left platform, each of which was assigned a name of someone in the audience, before choosing one and placing it on the right platform. After revealing a hammer from behind him, he then smashed the plaster object and declared for the person who's name was attached to the object to leave the performance. This repeated several times, before Josh smashed the object with his own name and thus had to leave the performance himself. Upon leaving, the hammer was passed to a member of the audience to continue the performance. The new performer smashed several objects and asked several audience members to leave before she in turn smashed her own plaster object and gave the hammer to another audience member. The pattern repeated until all plaster objects had been smashed and everyone had been asked to leave the performance. |
Marble Scales, 2018 - 2019
In this work, participants were paired up to stand on either side of a scale, with a marble precariously balanced in the center of the scale's arm. Each member of the pair would hold onto a small metal hook on the end of the scale's arm and the vibrations and bodily energy from the participants would cause the marble to roll along the arm. If the marble fell, the participants would reset it. The first two times the marble would fall, the pair was instructed to give one another a compliment. The fifth time the marble fell, the pair was instructed to give one another constructive criticism. Additionally, a larger version was built in 2019 in which more people could play at once. This new version also featured the table top itself being on an axle pivot. |
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Table Talk, 2018 - 2019.
In the first version of Table Talk, Josh Elston would come into the gallery every Tuesday afternoon and talk to a visitor about the dining tables throughout their life, each session lasting roughly 30 minutes to an hour. The process would start out with Josh constructing a crude diagram of the tables being described to him, complete with placement of the participant's family and their seating arrangements around it. Using the diagram, questions about the family structure were asked and the table as a social object became the nexus for analyzing relationships held around it. These questions slowly increased in stakes from impersonal spatial inquiries towards forming a pseudo-psychoanalytic therapist/client relationship. For participants who stayed long enough, or in particular participants who repeated the exercise with multiple sessions, this therapist/client relationship itself began to flip as Josh would reveal more information and let the client psychoanalyze his own thoughts. In 2019, the work was revisited and expanded with gently guiding instructions so that two participants could perform it themselves without the artist's presence. |
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Support Sketches, 2018. Photographs and Film Stills courtesy of Patrick Facemire.
In these performative sketches, Josh Elston carries around and supports canvas stretch bars (painting supports). How much human support is needed to maintain our inhuman structures and frameworks? |
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