Janiva Ellis: Fear Corroded Ape

January 31–April 6, 2025   

In preparing for her exhibition at the Carpenter Center, Janiva Ellis reengaged with paintings that had remained unfinishable in her studio for years, floating in and out of her consciousness. The artist has called these “dust bunny ideas”—hard-to-resolve paintings that settle into corners of her studio to be continuously reworked, with long breaks in between. As a result, much has changed in the world during their long gestation. Fear Corroded Ape asks what it means to assemble a group of “unresolvable” images.  

Ellis reconfigures a broad array of imagery from art historical portraiture and landscape conventions, animation, and popular culture into dissonant scenes. By turns explicit and obscuring, her paintings narrativize white existentialist mythology alongside social degradations and the brutal, nuanced forces that enable their denial. Employing a broad range of techniques and motifs, Ellis operates beyond the mere exposure of these forces, manipulating their sentimental resonances to reveal the desires inherent in cultural canonization.  

In her recent works, Ellis has excavated historic architectures and landscape as sites of modern ruin, imbued with cultural myths and violence. Amid debris, seemingly recognizable characters hover over crevices and fragments, unfinished passages that function beyond abstraction or as portals to other worlds. Here Ellis pictures our contemporary moment of falling empires and epistemologies often fronted by shining symbols. This is an aesthetics of aspiration becoming failure, dwelling in Western painting’s has glorification of violence as art history. Ellis’s work intervenes at the junction of destruction and creation by showing the painting’s ability to conceal, for example, the institution of whiteness as a quasi-heroic yet insidious specter in the canon. Ellis demonstrates how mythologies, once created, may be destroyed or fractured and refracted into newly estranged elements and arrangements. In moments where the dust never quite settles, each painting moves beyond the weight of finality, embracing possibility within precarity. 

Janiva Ellis: Fear Corroded Ape is curated by Dan Byers, John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director with Danni Shen, Curatorial and Public Programs Assistant, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. This project and Carpenter Center programs are organized by Laura Céré, Communications and Administrative Coordinator; Maria Gonzalez, Gallery and Bookshop Attendant; Matt Murphy, Exhibition Production Coordinator and Preparator; Sophie Pratt, Gallery and Bookshop Attendant; and Francesca Williams, Director of Exhibitions and Registration.  

This exhibition is made possible by Teiger Foundation. Generous support for Carpenter Center programming is provided by the Friends of the Carpenter Center. Special thanks for 47 Canal, New York.     

Janiva Ellis (b. 1987, Oakland, California) lives and works in New York City. Solo exhibitions include “Sussudio Pseudo Soothe,” Cabinet Gallery, UK (2024); “Hammer Projects: Janiva Ellis,” the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2023); “Rats,” The Institute for Contemporary Art, Miami (2021), and “Tip Drill,” 47 Canal, New York (2019). She has participated in group exhibitions such as the Whitney Biennial, New York (2019); and the New Museum Triennial, New York (2018); as well as a two-person exhibition with Donald Rodney at Arcadia Missa, London (2022). In 2018, Ellis was the recipient of the Rema Hort Foundation Emerging Artist Grant and the Stanley Hollander Award. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Rubell Museum, Miami; the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore; the Dallas Museum of Art; Dallas; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.