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Elliott appropriates images from very different genres, the landscapes of Gainsborough and Joseph Wright of Derby, models from advertisements, portraiture from Reynolds and furniture from interior design magazines. In bringing them together, to converse, she shows that a dialogue between high and low genres is not merely transgressive but can in itself produce a lucid analytic of vision. She asks high art to tell us of magazine art, she asks magazine art to tell of high art. Her work draws attention to difference in order to uncover common uncertainties. In this way Elliott facilitates the play of genres so as to insist they confront each other and re-define themselves through establishing what each is not.
Appropriations from high art can no longer be seen as provocative but their juxtaposition with appropriations from magazine design art can. The like treatment of high and low genres raises questions about the nature of representation and, most importantly, the nature of the production of these texts. This collecting and assembling of images plays at undoing concepts of the author. At the same time Elliott indulges the traditional expectations of 'painting' with a high level of mimetic technique. In this way she makes use and reference to the traditional understanding of what it is to look, to see, to apprehend the subject through its representation. The high realism of her work indulges traditional expectations of the elision of the trace of production at the same time as her compositions confront these expectations.
Elliott's reference points in high art history have most recently been developed within a prime institution of authorized art, the Queensland Art Gallery. She won the Melville Hayson Memorial Art Scholarship awarded through... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline