Colin Elmer is a New York–based artist whose work investigates how humans attempt to control and interpret the natural world. With a background in Communication Design (BFA, Parsons School of Design), Elmer works across painting, drawing and installation to deconstruct the boundaries between writing, image, and movement.
Elmer breaks apart image and form by leaving materials exposed, utilizing transparent surfaces, and emphasizing process over resolution. By revealing the scaffolding of image-making, he reduces it to its most direct form of communication. Central to his practice is the idea of mark-making as a form of language; non-semantic writing, gestural line work, and the movements of humans and animals are treated as interchangeable vocabularies.
Through this lens, his work examines the tension between humanity’s desire to dominate and systematize the natural world and nature’s inherent autonomy; from the domestication of animals to the symbolic systems humans construct to assign meaning.