re-title.com

Tom Ellis : Sweet F.A.
January 12 � February 16, 2007
Freight + Volume, New York


Freight and Volume is pleased to present the first NY solo exhibition of British artist Tom Ellis. The show�s title literally translates to �Sweet Fuck All� with the work, as well as the artist�s practice, based on the possibility that notions of failure and success, content and emptiness can be reversed at will.

Ellis seeks to question the accepted wisdom that only an artist�s �successful� output should make its way from the studio to the gallery.




For the exhibition, Ellis will install the site-specific sculpture, Sweet F.A. in the gallery�s front window - an object in which the tension between the aggressive meaning(lessness) of the text and the structure that supports it becomes the content of the work. In the main gallery, the artist will present two different series of deconstructivist paintings. Both bodies of work serve as a journalistic look into the artist�s mind and his take on the art world, and its institutions as a whole. These works, with such titles as Nothing, Fuck All, Nada and I Fucked up my Last Painting are paintings presented in their barest sense, stripped down raw, reduced to a confrontation between an incipient nihilism and human will.