Conversation with Elina Ansary
What interests you in collaborative work?
We’re all locked inside our own consciousnesses and we reach out to connect with others in many ways, but art enables us to connect in this specific visceral, nonverbal, psychological way. When I’m making my own work, it’s a little like shouting into a void. I don’t know who I’m talking to. I don’t know who the work will eventually reach. With collaborative work, I am turning towards someone specific: my collaborators. While solo work is like talking to yourself and hoping someone will hear and understand, collaboration is like having a conversation that will eventually be overheard.
How would you describe your work?
My work explores memory, and how we experience recollection, and how we process impermanence, and how collective memory shapes culture and community. I make rigorously rendered realistic paintings, and I use unusual materials and surfaces in order to bring traditional painting into a conceptual and experiential context. I present paintings like rituals, like reliquaries, like altars, invoking the symbolic history of material, and then catalyzing these elements with imagery.
What keeps you returning to this subject, body of work?
My earliest fascination was with Nostalgia. There’s a cultural consensus that dismisses nostalgia as being linked to sentimentality, but I totally disagree with that, and I think my work exists as an argument against that dismissal. Nostalgia is the oxymoronic yearning for something that by definition is impossible to have. It sits at the intersection of all these weighty ideas, like Death and Mortality, and Time and Memory, and Reality and Dreams. As time continually passes, nostalgia becomes an increasingly urgent conundrum and keeps me coming back for more.
Any new projects in the works?
Since 2018, I’ve been working on a multimedia social practice project called Ghost Tour: San Francisco, which charts collective memories tied to San Francisco neighborhoods as a way of dealing with the social changes caused by gentrification. I’ve produced works for three neighborhoods, but my original plan was to do 5-7. The project has been on pause for all of 2020, as I haven’t been able to travel to San Francisco. But I hope to pick the project back up and continue as things calm down. Since the beginning of the Pandemic, I have been producing a new body of work that is very painting-driven and image-heavy. These paintings are artificially generated dreams, meant to depict my subconscious as it processes memories of grief and joy. All of these paintings feature my hand in the foreground holding an object, placing the viewer squarely inside my body, and evoking the absurd but urgent symbology of dreams. I’m also working on illustrating an Afghan fairy tale that my father wrote for me and my sister when we were kids. These illustrations follow a similar, collage-informed image-building process as my recent paintings, and draw more heavily of Persian painting.
BIO: Elina Ansary combines painting with found-object assemblage to explore themes connected to memory, perception, and mortality. She was born and raised in San Francisco and received her BFA in Painting from Pratt Institute in 2013. In 2017, she completed a professional apprenticeship in Scenic Painting at The Juilliard School and attended a residency at BigCi in Australia. Since 2018, she has been working on a multimedia public art project called "Ghost Tour: San Francisco", which has been included in local festivals such as Litquake and SF History Days. Her work has been shown in galleries and DIY settings around New York and San Francisco since 2009. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.