Bio:

E. Elhoffer is an interdisciplinary artist who makes bizarre and visceral work. They earned their undergraduate degree from Kansas City Art Institute and are an MFA candidate at the Sam Fox School of Art & Design at Washington University. They live and work in St. Louis, Missouri, where they actively grapple with political adversity regarding their nonmale, nonbinary body. Elhoffer exhibits in galleries, museums and institutions nationally and internationally.

Elhoffer's work deals with themes that affect their body, such as the contemporary gaze cast upon it and mind-body dysphoria. Their pieces examine the ways in which societal norms, virtual space, and power structures shape one’s understanding of their bodily identity. Through their art, Elhoffer invites viewers to question their own assumptions and consider alternative ways of living within one's own flesh.

Artist Statement:

Is my body imagined?

Uncanny marriages of material morph into sculptural bodies, video monsters, or image-surrogates who perform for the viewer as both self and other. Their unique systems, whether visual or mechanical, interweave and coalesce, creating entities that possess a human-like presence in space.  Flapping over, tucking in, and spilling out; their voluptuous forms flex, sag, and flinch.

Morphologically dubious, my femme-presenting genderfluid form is un-fixed; it triggers the ever-shifting contours in my work. This fluidity is rooted in my psychological and psychosomatic experiences. Plagued by constant self-surveillance, I grapple with becoming objectified under a medical and/or male gaze. My body, and my artwork, tells a narrative which intertwines with intersectional discourses in fourth-wave feminism

I’m acutely aware of my body as it is imagined in the minds of others, and my practice generates my own kinds of imagined bodies to counteract this ‘othering’.  These proxies are acts of self-imaging. A boundless contemporary framework of identity, or ‘self’, is defined as something which is both experiential and socially programmed—an ever-metastasizing contradiction which leaves little room for me. Me: the subject and the object. Me: the vibrating desire between.

Whether upholstering velour fatty folds into sculptures, inflating saggy pink balloons, or extruding colon-shaped clay tubes, I grapple with questions of ownership and identity. How much of this body—truly and legally—is mine? Phasing through pixels, or clay, or latex, or vinyl, my art asks you: is your body real?