Elaine Robertson
Elaine Robertson is interested in how interacting with portraiture and figurative work prompts individuals to draw from a mental archive of pop culture, art history, stereotypes, and personal relationships. Working from her own mental archive, Elaine is often struck by their subconscious desire to exaggerate and dramatize these lodged figures. The mental archive of images is collective and creates inter-subjectivities. Elaine continuously explores how viewers draw from this shared imaginary. In her work, real people collide with the cartoon-like characters of dreams and memories. This is something Elaine explores in her work as a comedian as well as a painter.
Elaine is also investigating the pleasures of imaginative engagement with portraiture in relation to Kendall Walton’s concept of ‘imaginative projection’. Walton compares interaction with represented figures to the use of props, like a child would a doll. She constructs these protagonists with this theory in mind, as the figures become potential visual cues or dolls for the viewer’s ‘reality’.
She follows a process of consecutive re-appropriation and distancing from an image, which allows these archetypal images to be re-constructed more objectively. They aim to create boisterous protagonists that directly address the viewer and the space in which they are hung. Elaine often parodies low-brow, girlish aesthetics and the cultural category of ‘teenage girl hysteria’. She is committed to exploiting with humor and irreverence the decorative function of images of figures, especially in their relation to the feminine.