ELOISE SHERRID

“Well, there’s Titanium White, Zinc White, White Supremacy…”

In 2018, Eloise collaborated with multimedia artist Sonja John and painter Lauryn Welch to create the documentary-performance Chromophilia, examining the politics of color, the lines of subjectivity / objectivity,  the racial dynamics of who historically and contemporarily gets to observe and be acted upon, and the choices artists of color must make between abstaining or choosing to make identity based artwork.

Over the course of a five hour body painting performance, Lauryn camouflaged Sonja into her own textile screenprints, deciding together which parts of Sonja’s body to hide and which parts to blend in with her screen printed textiles. Eloise’s photography served as a representation of the audience and archivist. During the performance, the three talked about their respective ways of looking and seeing art, the ways that each used color in their respective practices, and wondered out loud how the brush textures, types of cameras, names of the paint colors, and the positioning of the textiles bring meaning to the work.

This piece was created in response to Chromophobia (2000), where David Batchelor argues that Western culture has an obsessive fear of color, purging it from art and intellectual thought by dismissing it as degenerate, superficial, feminine and foreign.

Chromophilia was developed collaboratively. Authorship is shared equally by all three artists.

2018