ABOUT

Elliott Linwood is an interdisciplinary artist based in San Diego, California. His training in performance art and background in computer programming informs his use of scores and notation systems as vehicles for story telling. For many years Linwood designed publications embedded with algorithms that generated indices pointing to other parts of the book. These kinds of cross-referencing strategies appear across a wide range of media from extended series and large-scale grids of photographs and sculptural installations to his daily performance and Life Art practice. The hybrid genre of Life Art is known for blurring the boundaries between a focused aesthetic awareness and the performance of rituals of everyday life. The practice originated with Allan Kaprow’s public "Happenings" on the East Coast in the United States in the late 1950s, which evolved on the West Coast into intimate "Events" which did not require an audience in the 1990s near the end of Kaprow's career. Linwood is particularly drawn to the interplay between task-oriented behaviors, chance and the uncanny sense of (dis)embodiment found in pivotal performance art pieces, which is pretty much the opposite of character development and narrative arcs incorporated into theatrical staging and acting. His conceptual and documentary projects highlight cultural artifacts, the presence and absence of bodies, performance aspects of identity and expressive enactments of community.