garments is a series constructed of scanned items of clothing put together to create an image beyond the clothing. This series is a continuation of Elissa’s interest in textures and their potential to elicit emotion. Using a scanner allows for sharp gradation from what is in focus to what is not, creating a potentially disorienting and uncomfortable position for the viewer.

Over the last year, art students have received the work of their peers in a distant, digital format, and while those pieces originally have dimensionality, they tend to feel flat and compressed to everyone except the artist. garments reflects her experience of receiving images that feel pressed against the computer screen yet inaccessible. Each of these articles of clothing has a history and is meant to be worn and touched, but in garments, they lose that because they are separated from their function. garments subverts an understanding of the space and texture of clothing, thus reflecting the kind of distortion experienced viewing art on a screen.

Elissa Maxwell is a graduating senior at the University of Washington, double majoring in Photo/Media and History with a minor in Art History. Through her studies in History and Art History, she has learned about the formation of identity and memory, which has inspired much of her own work. She works with photography to blur the lines between nostalgia and contemporary, often by manipulating images, whether in Photoshop or the darkroom. With a consistent focus on textures, Elissa often uses mediums that she initially dislikes, from quilts to photograms to scans, which allows her to be critical of the form while gaining an understanding of the medium’s history. Through this process, she tends to find the merits of the medium and returns to it in later works.

Elissa is from Vancouver, Washington, and is happy to now be living in a city. She plans to use her experience as an art and history student in university to inform her future work in art curation.