About Ely Tahan
Ely Tahan is a self-taught, multidisciplinary artist born in Lebanon and based in the Los Angeles area. His practice encompasses sculpture, assemblage, drawing, painting, photography, video, and writing, with an increasing emphasis on complex three-dimensional constructions and multimedia installations. His sculptural works bring together found and fabricated objects, domestic artifacts, mechanical devices, electronic imagery, and sound. Some operate through motorized movement and programmed sequences, while others rely on the interplay of materials, contrasting aspects, and unexpected formal associations. Rather than presenting a unified image from a fixed viewpoint, these constructions invite the spectator to move around them, discovering their changing configurations and the relationships that emerge among their components.
A World of Strange Machines.
Underlying this practice is an inquiry into the difference between an object and the functions, identities, and representations assigned to it. The artworks do not simply illustrate this distinction. Their material presence, changing aspects, and sometimes autonomous operation allow the question to unfold as an experience. The movement from predominantly image-based work toward sculptural assemblage has expanded rather than replaced the artist's engagement with other media. Drawing, photography, video, and writing remain complementary approaches, each bringing different possibilities and limitations to the encounter. Across these varied practices, the ordinary becomes a field of unsuspected relationships. The artwork offers no privileged vantage point from which to settle their meaning, but invites a sustained engagement with the objects themselves.
A dormant apparatus springs into motion at the flick of a switch. Familiar objects acquire unfamiliar dispositions; mechanisms, illuminated forms, and incongruous materials establish their own peculiar cadence. The term self-performing describes a recurring aspect of these constructions. Their performance is not an imitation of human activity but an unfolding of movements, sounds, images, and material relationships that continues independently of the spectator. The viewer encounters this activity through physical proximity and changing perspectives, participating without necessarily directing its course. Humor, incongruity, and a sense of wonder mingle with more unsettling associations. The familiar and the grotesque, the organic and the technological, the monumental and the miniature coexist in formations that elude established categories.
An Encounter with Objects.
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