Carol Elkovich
Land scape
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW after having degreed with a Bachelors of Fine Art of Sculpture, you nurtured your education with a Master of Arts in Design, that you received from the prestigious University of California at Berkeley: how do your studies influence your evolution as an artist? And in particular, how does your substratum inform the way you relate yourself to art making and to the aesthetic problem in general?
From early on I sought an education in cultural production that framed examination of the“ aesthetic problem” as an integral part of life. Beginning with my secondary education, I was fortunate to have lived within the immersive design experience of Eliel Saarinen’ s Cranbrook Campus in Michigan. Saarinen oversaw every minute design detail from patterns in brickwork, to the interiors and furniture, to even the cutlery in the dining halls. This left an impression about how art and design have a function in daily life. During my college years I studied in the San Francisco Bay Area where the roots of innovation and the voice of countercultures take precedent. The wildness in the culture and the striking natural environment inspire risk and beauty in my work. The erratic surf of the Pacific Ocean or the constant silent threat of earthquakes keep me from taking my environment for granted. I have long held an interest in how geological, historical, and cultural waves can be seen through the aesthetic vernacular of place and during my years at
University of California, Berkeley, I closely studied this visual history. My experience was perhaps more conceptually focused than your average MFA program because as a Visual Studies Major I was essentially an artistat-large within the College of Environmental Design( CED). Therefore, my peers were architects, urban planners, and landscape architects and ours was a conceptual kinship with varying practices that examined stewardship and human relationship to the land. My work has long expressed this subject through a variety of approaches and that is what led me to studying at the CED. Since then, for the past twenty-some years, I have been a professor of art. As both artist and teacher, I am deeply committed to grappling with the aesthetic problem, which I think of as a generator of innovation and critical examination.
You are a versatile artist and your practice includes a wide variety of media and disciplines: ranging from Painting to FIlm and Acting, the kaleidoscopic nature of your practice shows an organic synergy between a variety of expressive capabilities. Before starting to elaborate about your production, we would suggest to our readers to visit http:// www. carolelkovich. com in order to get a synoptic view of your multifaceted artistic production: while walking our readers through your process, we would like to ask you if you have you ever happened to realize that such multidisciplinary approach is