If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too.

-Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience”

Inspired by the ideas about interdependency that Thoreau articulated in the essay “Civil Disobedience”, Ellen Driscoll has filled the center gallery with an animated landscape that features an abandoned North Sea oil rig encrusted with a McMansion and other architectural structures. The dredging crane hoists a small colony of shotgun houses, while a surveillance satellite and billboard perch on opposite walls. The ghostly sculpture is made from translucent plastic. The artist chose to work exclusively with discarded #2 plastic cartons, a material associated with milk and water, our cleanest and purest drinks. In her recycling effort she harvested the containers on trash nights in her Brooklyn neighborhood, and collected from staff and visitors at Wave Hill. She notes that 86% of the plastic water bottles consumed in the United States end up as litter or unsorted waste, and that 40% of that waste is sold and shipped to China. Thus our refreshment is intertwined with the livelihood of people in distant parts of the globe. This timely project underscores the futility of our stance upon the shoulders of others.

In her sculpture, drawing and public art, Ellen Driscoll looks to diverse sources—architecture, the ancient memory arts, and primitive imaging techniques such as shadow play. For instance, her installation The Loophole of Retreat is based on the text Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. It was first exhibited at the Whitney Museum at Phillip Morris in 1991, and most recently in Legacies: Contemporary Artists Reflect on Slavery at the New York Historical Society in 2006. Her numerous public art commissions include As Above, So Below, a suite of twenty mosaic, bronze and glass reliefs that interpret the stories behind the constellations found on the Grand Central Terminal ceiling; these are installed in the underground passageways at the northern entrance to the Metro-North train platforms. Driscoll has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Massachusetts Cultural Council, Anonymous Was a Woman, the LEF Foundation, and Radcliffe’s Bunting Institute. She earned her BA from Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT and her MFA from Columbia University, New York, NY.

For more information: www.ellendriscoll.net