Elvis Richardson
(b. 1965, Sydney, New South Wales. Lives and works in Melbourne)

Elvis Richardson is an artist who frequently collects and curates the objects and imagery of everyday life, gathering raw material from public sources and reconstructing them to comment on taste, class and the realities of being a working artist. Through various media, Richardson’s work employs formalism and satire to expose the inherent contradictions of modern-day, ultra-commodified life on Earth.

In an expansion of the artist’s broader, ongoing investigation into the domestic sphere as a site for understanding the human condition, Settlement and the gatekeepers, 2022, a major new commission by the NGV, is a set of recognisable domestic gates that the artist has modified. Each gate has been reworked to feature the most frequently used synonyms of the word ‘settlement’, a common word with many usages and meanings. Meanwhile, the same English-language thesauruses seldom list the word ‘treaty’ as a synonym for the word ‘settlement’, but the inverse is regularly true. Settlement and the gatekeepers brings attention to this omission and invites the viewer to think about how access is socially constructed through meaning. With each gate powder-coated and rendered functional in the gallery space, visitors are able to interact with the structures and the questions they elicit.

Richardson’s works are held in the collections of the NGV, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Artbank, City of Fremantle, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Merri-bek City Council and the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art at the University of Western Australia. She has been the director of several artist-run initiatives, including First Draft (1996–97), Elastic (1999–2000), Ocular Lab (2008–10), DEATH BE KIND (2010–12) and True Estate (2017–18). She is also the founder of CoUNTess, a blog publishing data on gender representation in the Australian visual arts sector; www.countess.report.