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Artist Exhibitions:
Exhibition Record
Solo Exhibitions
2011- BAG, Glasgow Goodkind
Gallery, Glasgow, MT
2010- BAG, Independent Media
Center, Urbana, IL
2009- A Chronicle of Lovers
Center for the Book Arts, New
York, NY
Korean Notebooks
Orange Coast College
Photography Gallery, Costa
Mesa, CA 2009-
2008- Images from Ciudad
Colon, Galeria Nacional, San
...
Further Information
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Artist Galleries:
Coming Soon!
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Artist Reviews:
Dear Friends,
In my last email I announced
my partnership with United
States Artists to raise funds
for the BAG project to travel
to Montana. I am writing to
you again with a plea for
action. There are only
30-something days left for me
to reach my funding goal ...
Further Information
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Collections:
Coming Soon!
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Commissions:
Coming Soon!
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Artist Statement for Ellie Brown
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About My Sisters 1996-2006
I began photographing my sisters in 1993 during my first photography class in high school. It wasn’t until I was a junior at Mass Art that I began to take it seriously as a project and see its larger potential.
I began trying to compare my sister’s very different lives to my own. We have different mothers; theirs being Jane my stepmother, but we share the same father I was fascinated by how I thought they were being socialized into Girls with a capital G. I loved when I could catch them staring in the mirror pretending to have breasts, playing with their toy ironing boards and dolls or playing dress-up in a princess dress. At the same time, I started photographing their friends. What I discovered defeated my notion that there was an easy definition to what a girl is.
At this time Abby was seven and Emily was eight. Emily was adopted when I was 12 because my stepmother and father couldn’t conceive. As soon as they adopted her, Jane became pregnant with Abby. They are nine months apart and where always in the same grade. I was absolutely thrilled to have two little sisters because I had always dreamed of having one, not to mention two.
When my sisters entered my life, I was going through some very rough pre-adolescent years. I strongly believe that t the timing of their coming into my life during those years has everything to do with when I started photographing them and why I’ve continued for ten years. I always felt that their upper middle-class upbringing was privileged in many ways that I never could access in my own life. They had two parents, a stable household and many material possessions I was never granted. I moved out of my father’s house to attend college when they were five and so we had some years together where I understood their lives, but afterwards I tried to understand through my camera.
Our twelve and thirteen year age difference has really left a gap in closeness that I have with my natural brother and that they have with each other. I know that every time I would come home and photograph it felt to me as if we were spending time together but they resented me only coming to spend time and take photos. (Or at least that is how they remember it.)
I will paint a brief portrait of my sisters. Emily has always done well in school and may very well be considered an overachiever. She excelled in swimming and collected a huge amount of ribbons and trophies. She’s goofy and has an oddball sense of humor the family finds endearing. Emily knows more about college football than anyone I’ve ever met and wants to go into sports management. She has traveled to Mexico and Puerto Rico to work on public service projects. She also developed anorexia in 2004. Emily’s sickness has been a huge strain on the family in trying to get her the help she needs and trying to understand. I live 300 miles away and often feel helpless in that there is nothing I can do to help her but to tell her that I live her and I think that she is a beautiful and amazing person. She’s slowly getting better, meaning that she knows to eat enough to stay out t of the hospital, but she still displays anorexic symptoms. For a while she wouldn’t let me photograph her and now I understand that as her wanting to disappear physically, which a camera will not allow. In June 2006, Emily graduated high school and is planning to take a year off at home to do an internship in sports management and take night classes.
Abby was always a funny and charismatic child. She often would do hysterical impressions of people and well as lip sync and dance to songs she liked. From an early age, Abby always showed an interest in her appearance, spending much time in front of the m mirror and playing with clothes. In middle school Abby jointed a materialistic, partying and mean popular group and her personality completely changed. She became mean and manipulative and obsessed with material possessions. She failed to graduate high school because to too many skipped classes and has yet to learn to take responsibility for her life. In the past year she’s refused to let me photograph her anymore and so any recent image I have of her is of her back turned to the camera or of her empty room. Abby makes me ad because also lover her and I feel l like I’ve had so little impact as a positive female role model in her life. I want her to succeed and it’s hard to watch her mess up again and again, to learn her lessons the hard way.
In this book I have juxtaposed older images that I feel converse well with the newer images. We can see physical changes absolutely but the personalities we see may be presented more subtlety.
For these ten years I have been fascinated with how a girl, specifically my sisters, develops identity through her adolescence. I am interested in how she may show or hide that identity and what steps she took to own it. I can look at my own process of developing my identity and find non-similarities to my sisters. It is my hope that this quest is expressed in the images and will in fact open dialogue about what girls go through emotionally, academically and physically to find or not find their strong woman inside. I have done a lot of research over these ten years about girls, their confidence and their voice, referencing people like Carol Gilligan, Peggy Orenstein, Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Jean Kilbourne and others. It’s been a very powerful for me to show this work to a group of girl shouts or high schooolers and talk about my sisters' issues and the images to have the audiences critique and respond from their point of view, still being in the middle of it all.
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