Ellen Coleman Izzo

Room#: 404

Website: www.ellencolemanizzo.com

Email: ellencolemanizzo@gmail.com

Statement:
The Homeless Memorial is a mixed media installation project begun as a response to a trolley tour of the monuments and memorials of Washington, DC, replete with an amazing view of the endemic homeless population. The installation re-enacts the eleven stops along an existing trolley route of the DC monuments while proposing a twelfth stop: The Homeless Memorial.

Flattened refrigerator boxes proved to be a versatile substructure for assembling the eleven trolley stop environments. The boxes house the re-created monuments, memorials, and museums while contextual imagery is derived from piecing together crayon rubbings, drawings, and painting, infused with photographs, postcards, and snippets of the trolley map.

Further contributing to the aesthetic of the series, eleven homeless figures were born of the scrappiness of collagraph plates, printed on bits and pieces of papers and plastic bags, and cut from the extraneous material to roam free among the monuments. One new figure is introduced at each trolley stop: Ricky stands alone at Trolley Stop 1: Union Station. Hector enters the scene at Trolley Stop 2: The Capitol, and so on, until the crowded conditions at the eleventh stop push them out of the picture plane and into their own sculptural space: The Homeless Memorial.