Buck Ellison

Something profoundly, even troublingly, hygienic resides at the center of Buck Ellison’s photographs. With an idiosyncratic deadpan, Ellison offers a vision of health- and wealth-conscious upper-middle-class white people in America. Raised in one of its key centers of cultivation – Marin County just north of San Francisco – Ellison knows this world from the inside out. His work functions like a mirror directed not just at the social world in which he was reared, but also for the privileged art consumer that is his presumed audience. Yet unlike Tina Barney, whose photographs of East Coast WASPs are an evident influence on Ellison's work, Ellison keeps a critical distance from his subject. His project is not documentary or even particularly sympathetic, but rather curious and clinical, with a touch of satire.

Recent exhibitions include Country Day at Bentheim Castle, Germany, Home at Night Club Gallery in Chicago, Villa Aurora Revisited at Balice Hertling, New York, and Snakes in the Grass at Laura Bartlett Gallery in London.