ELLIOTT INFINITY

by Ross Harris

Closing Show – Saturday, March 30, 2024 (6-10pm)

“Last year I did a street art project in protest of the Elliott Smith mural in Silver Lake being whitewashed. I had this image of Elliott from the outtakes of the 16mm performance footage from our music video for his song Coming Up Roses that we created in 1995. Elliott breaks character and flashes that smile of his and I made a wheat paste poster of it. My intent is to portray the fun loving person that I knew to try and counter the doomed poet reputation that Elliott seems to have acquired. Not that it’s not a legitimate aspect of his life but there needs to be a balance. When I think of him I don’t remember that at all. It’s heavily outweighed by the acerbic jokester with the beautiful smile. So I started pasting the image on an electrical box across from the mural and in front of the now shuttered but beloved Cafe Tropical. It’s a significant location as there is a great Autumn Dewilde photo shot from across the street and we shot some of our music video for his song Miss Misery in a nearby alley. I’m not interested in pasting his face all over town. Just someplace that has a connection. As it turns out this location is a heavily enforced no graffiti zone and my wheat paste was being whitewashed regularly. Sometimes within the hour. But I was determined to keep putting it up until Elliott’s visage was returned to the wall across the street. After some time I decided to create this playful infinity effect wherein I would have someone walk by the box after I had just pasted it up and then next week paste up that image and on and on. I think we ended up with 6 images like this including one of the guy that was whitewashing the electrical box himself. Eventually we succeeded in getting Elliott back up on the wall with a nice mural created by Pau. We met on the street that day and I told her about my project and we talked about possibly doing a recap at her space some day. It was such a fun and meaningful project for me and I always wanted to share the images from it all together for those that didn’t get to experience it in real time. Which were very few. Owing to the ephemeral nature of the project.”