Was Here: Visual Artist Ellie Dicola

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This month's podcast is a conversation with Seattle-based artist Ellie Dicola. As part of Seattle Storefronts, a program that places artist projects in vacant storefront spaces, Ellie created the installation Was Here. As a corporeal monument to places that are gone, Was Here is a documentation of local businesses and organizations that have disappeared over the last handful of years. Ellie refers to her project as a map of experiences, and in our discussion of evolution and change, we explore what it means to give voice to memory and to create a place to collectively mourn the intangible. Thanks for listening!

Ellie Dicola has lived and worked in Seattle since graduating with an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005. Her background in sculpture has developed into a creative practice focused in video, performativity, experimental poetics and net-based platforms. She employs devices, often highly autobiographic, that speak to the overtly female. Working from the forces of love, hate, desire, death, madness and belief, a process of self-identification is at the core of her work. She approaches embodiment as a site--inevitably gendered and politicized--where agency and refusal posit further questions.  Ellie has an interest in alternative exhibition formats, having most recently presented a guerrilla project on pornhub.com through the avatar HipsLipsTitsPower. Her work has been shown at On The Ground Floor (Los Angeles), Present Company (Brooklyn), Seattle University's Hedreen Gallery, the Henry Art Gallery Test Site (Seattle), and on the Amazon campus through Shunpike's Storefronts Program.