Sasha Frere-Jones interviews JJJJJerome Ellis in Frieze, forthcoming exhibition at Index

Sasha Frere-Jones interviews JJJJJerome Ellis for the September Issue of Frieze, ahead their forthcoming exhibition at Index, which is currently on view at Secession.

JJJJJerome Ellis’s exhibition An unfinished calendar that commemorates slaves escaping their enslavers, 1673–1886 opened at Vienna Secession on 10 September and will open at Index in Stockholm on 20 November.

From the article:

“Though Ellis identifies primarily as a musician, his practice has expanded over the last decade into poetry, photography, performance, drawing and video. His oldest and closest friend, James Harrison Monaco, is someone he’s been making theatre pieces with for years. ‘He’s the only true polymath I think I’ve ever known,’ Monaco tells me. Much of this expansive creativity manifested in The Clearing, Ellis’s 2021 double-LP and book that functions as a genuine starting point, though it is not technically his debut. The album and book began as neither music nor poetry but as an article published in 2020 by the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies, called ‘The clearing: Music, dysfluency, Blackness and time.’ (Dysfluency is a technical term for stuttering, a condition Ellis inherited from his mother.) The paper, which quotes from the formerly enslaved, opens with Ellis positing that ‘Blackness, dysfluency and music are forces that open time.’”

“His kindness is a strike against time. Reading his poems and looking at his photographs and going to his gallery shows is to bear witness to an artist who does not accept the degradations that characterize the American approach to life.”

Read the full article here.