Janiva Ellis — Fear Corroded Ape
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
Impressions in Spring, 2022–2024 Oil on canvas h. 23 1/2 × 36 inches (59.69 × 91.44 cm). © Janiva Ellis. Courtesy of the artist and 47 Canal, New York. Photo: Julia Featheringill.
At the Carpenter Center, Fear Corroded Ape gathers Janiva Ellis’s long-gestating “dust bunny” paintings—works held back, reworked, and unruly until now. The exhibition stitches together cartoon figures, art-historical ruins, and half-finished passages into a vision of empires in decline. Ellis uses humor, dissonance, and painterly bravado to expose the myths Western painting has glorified and to fracture them into new, estranged possibilities. The result is an exhibition that finds energy in precarity and meaning in the unfinished.
