Elliott Elliott is an interdisciplinary artist, communist and friend from Juneau, Alaska, currently working and living in Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal, Quebec. They hold a BFA in Studio Arts from The School of Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Concordia University. Elliott’s work explores queer and working class socialities, their intersections and epistemological frameworks.
“What does knowledge do—the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it, the receiving again of knowledge of what one already knows? How, in short, is knowledge performative, and how best does one move among its causes and effects?”
Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
As a trans person, sometimes my actual body feels like a defacto confrontation to normative social orders. This propels me to seek out ways of knowing and speaking that frame knowledge and meaning as in-progress, flexible, and socially responsive. It’s a material necessity—speech traces bodies from the moment of birth (“It’s a boy!”), and social markers and norms fall in place after it. The way sets of information are accumulated, codified and circulated tell us how to know and speak, but also how to be. A lateral and malleable organization that lets us see a body of knowledge as flexible and incomplete is like what Lyn Hejinian calls an ‘open text’. “The ‘open text’....invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in the other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies ....that is, it resists reduction and commodification.” In my work I always come back to forms that allow me to encounter knowledge in this way, elastic and forgiving, able to accommodate differing material realities, allowing for differentiation between the material and ideological. Imagining what knowledge is is an essential component to understanding what it does, but also what one can do with it, “how best [to] move among its causes and effects[.]”