Elle “Take Your Skin Off” at The City Don’t Sleep. (Brooklyn, NYC)

April 29, 2013 ,

Elle’s show on the 4th of May, Take Your Skin Off, is set to release the “ELLE Tattoo Girl” series, featuring hand painted photographs paired with reproductions. The show will explore transformation and the assumption of new identity. Graffiti is all about hiding one’s identity, using an alter ego, a shroud of mystery. On the same token, there is widely spread commodification of the graffiti artist in the public eye. This juxtaposition plays off of contemporary culture’s obsession with advertisement, fame, and the proliferation of image and icon. ELLE is exploiting the idea of notoriety and the visual competition with and collaboration of marketing space. Can someone be notorious just because their icon is everywhere? Because people can identify and have seen it? Is this fame?  


ELLE is graffiti obsessed. In Take Your Skin Off, the artist exposes herself by unveiling the masked persona and identifying herself with her larger-than- life pseudonym. ELLE= ALL WOMEN. ELLE, SHE is represented throughout the city and standing fiercely. SHE is protecting all of the walls and is the equal counterpart of the male ego. Is the work about the female skin and how we choose to represent ourselves? Are we comfortable in “the skins that we are wearing?” Then again, maybe ELLE is just objectifying the woman… is ELLE a woman? Is ELLE a man? What is it with graffiti and the addiction of writing ones name over and over again everywhere? What happens when the lines are crossed and the graffiti writer starts pasting these images everywhere and suddenly it becomes like media/propaganda and advertising combined with street art? Why is this image everywhere?!


ELLE’s show, Take Your Skin Off, will be opening May 4th, from 7-10pm, at The City Don’t Sleep. (410 Broadway, Brooklyn, NY 11211). DJ Cat King will be spinning and Brooklyn SixPoints Brewery will be sponsoring the show. Come parteeee!
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