George Elkanah Swann Reynolds IV
Elkanah’s aesthetics emerge from some combination of charcoal, oil stick, oil, pixels, and AI. Isolation is a common theme in his work. His figures have a solitary quality about them, especially when they’re not alone. Maybe they’re focused. Maybe they’re sad. Maybe they’re bored or content. Maybe they’re lost in consciousness.
Lately, his subject matter tends to draw from banal activities of the everyday (like going shopping, cleaning, swimming, or killing bugs). In the artist’s own words, “I like the idea of immortalizing an experience that is generally forgettable. Perhaps it’s related to the impulse of wanting to turn nothing into something.”
Elkanah’s background is in advertising and the reflex of creating ads is found scattered throughout his work. “This process is familiar, meditative and, most importantly, void of market-driven objectives. My brands are imagined, not iconic. My messaging is often unpolished and confusing, or abstract. Sometimes they’re made with pixels, sometimes they’re made in paint, and sometimes they’re made with both. Every so often I’ll feel the urge to make a statement.”
Shopping, swimming, and certain chores is on view throughout the month of September. The exhibit is sponsored by Swann’s Department Stores, Interstellar Inmate, and See Miami.
SHOPPING
SPONSORED BY SWANN’S DEPARTMENT STORE
George Elkanah may be one of the least-known American artists of the 21st century—but he remains among its most
inventive. Throughout a prolific and unpredictable career, Elkanah has embraced emerging technologies and continually
re-imagined what art can be. His early Post Persuasion ads, published in Streetwise Magazine from 2012 to 2014, marked
a bold, conceptual entry point—part social commentary, part public intervention.
This new series—just eight pieces in total—is already being recognized as some of his most nuanced and provocative work.
Created between the winter of 2024 and the summer of 2025 at his garage studio in Rosenberg, Texas, the exhibition traces the quiet choreography of consumer life: browsing, trying things on, waiting in line. It’s a wry, joyful meditation on the overlooked rituals of buying—especially resonant during the seasonal churn of back-to-school shopping. Elkanah finds poetry in the mundane, and in doing so, asks us to look again at what we take for granted (including artists like him).
The exhibition is sponsored by Swann’s Department Stores and may be viewed in the 621 Gallery main exhibition space throughout the month of September.
SWIMMING
SPONSORED BY SEE MIAMI
SWIMMING explores a nuanced lifestyle perspective on climate change. The exhibition places Elkanah in a community of friends who have
embraced the pool party not as nostalgia, but as a late-in-life ritual of joy, resistance, and reinvention. Some critics have interpreted the work
as a subtle celebration of the technologies that have re-framed climate anxiety—not by denying rising seas, but by adapting to them. In this view,
SWIMMING captures the mood of a generation inching toward an urban, aquatic lifestyle with curiosity rather than fear.
“Elkanah is an artist of his time—and with this exhibit, an artist for all time,” said Tarra Reynolds, Director of Garage Party Gallery in Rosenberg, Texas. “SWIMMING reveals a shared cultural moment: an emerging appreciation for rising sea levels, not as catastrophe, but as context.”
Elkanah looks to have knocked on the door of public opinion. When no one answered, he gave it a shove—flooding the room with inflatable optimism. With this sponsorship, See Miami celebrates him, and aquatic culture, for redefining how we float through the future. Additional support is provided by the U.S. Department of Oceanic Urban Development and the Blue Frontier Regulatory Agency.
CERTAIN CHORES
SPONSORED BY INTERSTELLAR INMATE
The exhibition begins with a spontaneous series of cockroach paintings that were sparked by a moment in the artist’s garage
studio when he chose not to kill a roach that scurried across the floor. What began on a whim evolved into a quietly unsettling
reflection on the destruction of nature through technology—and on Elkanah’s empathy for those society has deemed sub-human.
Perhaps without fully intending to, he traces a narrative laced with authority, privilege, and fear.
Also included are two paintings inspired by Elkanah’s least favorite domestic chores: gardening and cleaning. Like the cockroach works, these pieces appear to probe the uneasy boundaries between life, nature, and perhaps even murder. Overall, Certain chores does a nice job of blending dark humor and quiet introspection around the human impulse to destroy or control. The exhibit is sponsored by Interstellar Inmate, free to the public, and on view at 621 Gallery in Tallahassee throughout the month of September. This marks George Elkanah’s third exhibition with the gallery.
