Blue and White Iris

This painting, "Blue and White Iris", is by Gregory Ellis. Greg is a self taught artist living in Colorado. The origin of this series began when one day at work he an un-peeled orange in a zip-lock bag on someone’s desk. He was dumbstruck. It created an immediate, uneasy visceral feeling like he was witnessing a perversion of nature. Yet it was also evocative of the broader discomfort and sweaty palms of anyone witnessing mankind’s subversion of nature in every context. The Zip-Loc bag series was conceived at that moment. 

Humankind and nature: what are the effects of each on the other? The influence of people has blurred the lines between the natural and the artificial. Climate change, artificial intelligence, genetically modified organisms and meta worlds challenge our biology and our sense of connection to nature. 

Greg’s early work in this series explored these feelings as the zip-lock bag played the role of antagonist to objects form the natural world. Over time his perspective shifted as he began to see the bag differently. The bag has become a lens and mirror for a wider narrative. Like O’Keefe’s flower images, the bags fold and unfold alluringly, yet the hermetic barrier keeps us from connecting with the sensual/sexual of the subject matter. In paintings depicting open bags, the welcoming, seductive, womb-like surfaces and the sterility of the material is paradoxical. Articulate rendering seduces and then challenges us to consider our relationship with nature.