BIOGRAPHY
Laurence Elias was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., and now lives and works in Berkeley, CA. He works in various media, including photography, digital, painting, and weaving. Pivoting from a prior career as a physician/scientist, he attended the California College of the Arts and received his MFA in 2018. His earlier professional experience engendered an appreciation of how complex structures, such as those of cells and organisms, emerge from simpler repeated elements. Aware of the constructed nature of our perceived reality, his uncanny work is built upon conflicting cues of spatiality within images of clear geometric solids, through which unusually colored, intricate patterns are seen.
CV
Laurence Elias received an M.F.A. in visual art from California College of the Arts in 2018. Elias’ work was recently in an invited two person show in Gearbox Gallery, Oakland CA, and was shown as a solo exhibit at Sebastopol Community Art Center, Sebastopol CA. Other venues of competitively juried group shows include Gearbox Gallery; Gallery Route One, Point Reyes Station, CA; Bedford Gallery, Walnut Creek, CA; ARC Gallery, San Francisco; Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley; TAG, Los Angeles; and The Rhode Island and New York Centers for Photographic Art, by which he was awarded a prize.
STATEMENT
Elias explores the active nature of perception by which our reality is constructed. These works’ lines, forms, and shapes present vivid cues of spatiality, at uncanny tension with their true planar nature. Formed from geometric jumping-off points, these abstractions are characterized by unusual color palettes and optical distortions of intricate patterns. Fragments of images are deployed in intricate wall sculptures, which enhances the perceptual challenge.
