Artist Statement/ Biography

Carrie Elston Tunick’s videos focus on shared emotional reactions, addressing love and sanctioned violence through appropriated imagery. She explores subjects that are deeply cared about by the masses, encompassing the struggles and passions of the whole as opposed to those of an individual. She strips away contexts, using low-resolution footage that lends itself to repetition and blurriness. These pieces address the violence inherent in extreme emotion, most of all love. They estheticize mob mentality, by exploring demographics of people that are united through their manic reactions to serious and superficial subject matter. Elston Tunick’s videos investigate value systems, aligning the unrelated emotional priorities of people around the world, and extinguishing any hierarchy of importance beyond the intensity of collective emotion.

---

Carrie Elston Tunick is an artist who makes videos, sound installations, and paintings. Her work focuses on shared emotion, drawing on subjects that range from politics to sports, consumerism to religion, always focusing on what makes people feel deeply. Elston Tunick received a B.A. from Yale University in 2003, and an M.F.A. from Hunter College in 2010. She has held residencies at Artists Alliance LES Rotating Studio Program, and Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace. Her work has been written about in Greenpoint Gazette and on DNAinfo. In 2011 Elston Tunick won the New York Art Marathon Prize, and in 2013 she was awarded a curatorial grant from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. She has exhibited in New York and internationally.