Artist Talk: Ellie Honl

Last Thursday, the artist Ellie Honl gave a talk on the third floor of the art building (much thanks to the Capital City Arts Initiative, which is currently hosting a show of Ellie's work, "The Heart of the Quandry," at the CCAI Carson City Courthouse Gallery). Her work deals with the subjectivity of extreme psychological states, sometimes playing with the visual rhetoric of psychological tests. The above print combines the cockeyed Es of child vision charts with canaries in various states of horizontality and verticality, playing with the notion of the "canary in the coalmine" as an indicator of safety.

While at grad school, she started using video in conjunction with her prints, as a way of teasing out her pictorial narratives. You can check out some of those clips at her website.