Made In L.A. 2020 Exhibition, Hammer & Huntington Museum, 2021

Drawing on the vocabulary of stock photography, Buck Ellison produces meticulously detailed images that examine white American wealth. On the surface his large-format images appear to mildly reproduce the habits and tastes of affluent families, WASP dynasties, or Ivy League students. Lurking beneath this, however, is a deep inquiry into how whiteness and privilege are sustained and broadcast. With references to seventeenth-century Dutch family portraits, Ellison plants codes in his compositions, telling details that act as clues. These tableaux showcase the mechanisms that quietly, even politely, obscure inequality in the United States.