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Jason Ellis

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Monkey Gone To Heaven

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8 Nov - 11 Dec 2024

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Oliver Sears Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new stone carvings by Jason Ellis, one of Ireland’s foremost sculptors in stone.

 

Continuing with the format of bas-relief, sculptor Jason Ellis turns his focus to animal extinction. Simulacra, Ellis’ last exhibition in the gallery took place at the end of 2019, the dawn of the pandemic only a season ahead. It is not difficult to follow Ellis’ arc of investigation. In the pre-virus thinking of Simulacra, Ellis reinterpreted bas-reliefs from antiquity to the Renaissance, millennia of pre-industrial human progress. The portal of the pandemic brought the notion of human extinction to the steps of everyone’s conscience. Suddenly, climate change and lifestyle came to the fore of our soul searching - less war and more pestilence. Alas, the emergence of war on an old-fashioned 20thCentury scale punctured this newfound priority and humanity continues to rob itself of a viable future.

 

Monkey Gone to Heaven memorialises extinct animals, the most famous of which, the dodo, has entered the lexicon to hyperbolise death. Ellis places them with his expert technique, almost doubling as a mortician, in slate frames, small windows on an intransmutable past which may serve as markers to a still-undecided future.

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“There was a guy

Got killed by ten million pounds of sludge 

From New York and New Jersey – 

 

The creature in the sky
Got sucked in a hole, now there's a hole in the sky
And the ground's not cold

And if the ground's not cold, everything is going to burn
We'll all take turns, I'll get mine too –

 

This monkey's gone to Heaven”

 

(Monkey Gone to Heaven © Pixies)

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