Ellen Jantzen
Blazing Editions is excited to announce that Ellen Jantzen is showing at The Billboard Creative in the Los Angeles Area. In February, the non-profit arts organization The Billboard Creative opens its sixth exhibition, bringing large-format art from emerging and established artists to 34 billboards across Los Angeles. The exhibition is running from February 3rd to February 28th.
“Our concept is to treat the city as an open-air gallery for both the benefit of the artists and Los Angeles. LA drivers have passed our boards literally tens of millions of times since we started. That’s public art on a mass scale and an audience that is rare for an artist."
- TBC Founder and Executive Director Adam Santelli.
With the goal of shining light on underexposed artists and their practices through major public exhibitions, The Billboard Creative (TBC) turns billboard advertising spaces into accessible art exhibitions open to anyone in Los Angeles. The Billboard Creative selects works through a curated, blind submission process open to all and shows them alongside guest artists, including Ed Ruscha, Paul McCarthy, Marilyn Minter, and Alex Prager. This year’s show includes works in a broad range of media, photography, painting, assemblages, mixed media, collage, and sculpture.
"The Billboard Creative forefronts innovative artists and situates them in the slipstream of one of the world’s most vibrant art centers. Promoting artistic practice has been a core passion of mine for over 20 years, and to be able to work with great artists, giving them a vast canvas and a multi-million-sized audience, has been amazingly gratifying.”
- Curator Christopher Vroom, founder of arts nonprofit Artadia.
Ellen Jantzen's work can be best described as Photo Montage. She creates two-dimensional imagery as limited edition prints using a variety of drawing and photography software. To start, Jantzen uses original digital photographs and begins by layering and recoloring. The images are manipulated in many ways, and the process becomes infinite as further re-coloring and re-manipulation occur; a re-creation takes place. Time is irrelevant as memory takes hold. Jantzen's work links traditional and digital art forms.
The chosen photo for this exhibition is called "To Have and Have Not." This image is part of a series called "Unity of Time and Place."
"Some say, all time exists at once; the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future are regarded as a whole. As always, I am deeply interested in reality... so this cohesion mesmerizes me. After several years immersed in the past, I am ready to embrace the future. But as I set out, the past is with me, transformed. All the losses are still there, but there is a brightness forming that allows me to see the entirety, the unity of time and place."
-Ellen Jantzen
This particular photo was created from a brush pile that her parents started on their 5 acres in rural Missouri shortly before they passed. While cleaning out their home, she came across a lot of sensitive documents, so she decided to add all of them to the pile and set it ablaze. This can be interpreted as a funeral pyre of sorts…. a ceremony of saying goodbye to her parents.
The Billboard is located at 905 N Fairfax Ave, West Hollywood, CA 90046
