Crosstown Arts presents an Opening Reception for Reflection + Ritual + Refuge, a solo exhibition by Brantley Ellzey. Come celebrate the opening of new works with a special menu created by Owner/Chef Shayne Diaz of Kuya —food generously donated by Ben E. Keith—including Ube Mochi Waffles, Pancit Kabute, and Adobo Bao Buns and two complimentary cocktails from Art Bar at Crosstown Arts called “Strawberry Spiral”—featuring Cathead Honeysuckle Vodka, lemon, apple juice, and wild berry shrub and “Paper Jam”—featuring Cathead Honeysuckle Vodka, lemon, and carrot cake syrup. Live music by “The Diamond Strings” Quartet. The event is free and open to the public.
When: October 10, 2025 from 6 to 9 p.m.
Where: Crosstown Arts — 1350 Concourse Avenue, Ste. 280 Memphis, Tennessee 38104
About the Exhibition:
Brantley Ellzey
REFLECTION + RITUAL + REFUGE STATEMENT
In Reflection + Ritual + Refuge, artist Brantley Ellzey weaves a world where repetition becomes
remembrance, where reflection fractures into beauty, and where the quiet, persistent act of making
becomes a form of resistance.
Across media and gesture, Ellzey explores how we survive—by circling back, by touching what’s been
lost, by naming what others ignore. Rolling, collecting, documenting, layering—these are his rituals. Some
are personal. Some are political. All are acts of reckoning.
The spiral is his recurring form. It turns through the exhibition like a silent logic—natural, ancestral,
unstoppable. It’s found in architecture, in emotion, in protest, in paper. Each gesture becomes a structure.
Each structure becomes a kind of refuge.
This is work that blurs the line between the sacred and the ordinary. Between the deeply interior and the
publicly defiant. There are no beginnings or endings here—only movement, only return.
Reflection + Ritual + Refuge is not a single story, but a field of them. It invites the viewer to look closer, to
enter slowly, to see how something small—repeated—can become something vast.
ARTIST BIO
Brantley Ellzey is a Memphis-based artist known for transforming everyday printed materials into
sculptural works that explore memory, place, and cultural identity. Raised in Osceola, Arkansas, and
trained at Tulane University in Theater and Architecture, Ellzey brings a unique, multidisciplinary
approach to his work—blending architecture, design, and storytelling.
Ellzey has played a vital role in Memphis’s creative landscape, first establishing his studio in the heart of
Crosstown. His current space at Summer Avenue and Baltic Street continues to serve as both a working
studio and gallery.
Ellzey’s work appears in collections across the country, including St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital,
Steelcase, Conde Nast and Nicole Kidman’s production headquarters. His art invites viewers to see the
beauty and meaning in what’s often overlooked.
ARTIST BIO (East Atrium)
BRANTLEY ELLZEY
REFLECTION + RITUAL + REFUGE
REFLECTIONS
In a world of relentless motion and media noise, the Reflections installation (“Reflections” being a nod to a
storied gay bar in Memphis.) invites the viewer into a space of quiet disorientation—where distortion
reveals deeper truths.
Using rolled mirrored mylar as both material and metaphor, this body of work challenges our relationship
with perception. The surfaces ripple, fracture, and fold light into fragmented realities, evoking the tension
between clarity and chaos. Echoing the Hypostyle Hall in Luxor, Egypt—where towering columns once
housed ritual, reverence, and collective awe—this installation transforms the gallery into a contemporary
sanctuary. The space becomes both architectural and emotional: a forest of mirrored pillars that hold not
just structure, but memory.
The act of rolling—a primal, physical gesture—becomes a meditative ritual, a way to process the
turbulence of current events and personal anxieties. Meticulous yet destabilizing, the work invites viewers
to confront their own shifting perspectives. The mirrored mylar refuses to offer a perfect reflection;
instead, it bends the familiar into the uncanny, revealing how fragile and flexible our realities truly are.
This installation honors reflection as a radical act, ritual as a survival mechanism, and refuge as a
necessary, sacred space.
ARTIST STATEMENT (East Gallery)
BRANTLEY ELLZEY
REFLECTION + RITUAL + REFUGE
SPIRAL ARCHITECTURES
In Spiral Architectures, the act of rolling paper becomes both a personal ritual and a sculptural meditation
on time, memory, and survival. Composed of rolled vintage magazines, construction paper, a complete
1962 encyclopedia, targets, Mylar, cellophane and hand-stamped black paper marking every day the
artist has been alive, this installation turns an ordinary gesture into an extraordinary archive.
Drawing inspiration from a childhood memory—a local craftsperson in the artist’s hometown who worked
with rolled paper— Spiral Architectures reclaims that modest tradition and reimagines it as a practice of
resilience. Each roll becomes a vessel: of cultural ideals, domestic fantasies, gendered expectations,
historical knowledge, and the private rituals of a life lived through seismic personal and collective events.
This is a space where time is both compressed and expansive. The repetitive gesture of rolling,
performed over and over, mirrors the mental and emotional work required to process life's challenges.
The materials—both personal and public, nostalgic and overlooked—are transformed into quiet
monuments.
Like the mirrored columns in the adjacent space, these works reflect a desire for order in the face of
chaos. But while the columns reach outward and upward, Spiral Architectures turns inward, into
memory—into the places of refuge we build within ourselves.
ARTIST STATEMENT (East Gallery – Small Room)
BRANTLEY ELLZEY
RFLECTION + RITUAL + REFUGE
2025 PROJECT
2025 Project confronts the sharp edge of the present moment—where reflection gives way to resistance,
and refuge is found not in memory but in the uncompromising act of creation.
This section uses the same ritual of rolling paper found throughout Reflection + Ritual + Refuge, but here
the material is weaponized. Pages from Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise are rolled
and overlaid with the image of an oversized hand gripping a gun. Nearby, printed shooting targets—also
rolled—are clustered in groupings, their form echoing both vulnerability and defense. These works refuse
subtlety; they inhabit a space of threat, visibility, and protest.
As a queer artist, the creator of this work grapples with a growing fear for the future—particularly the
fragility of hard-won rights like same-sex marriage. 2025 Project names the unspoken: that the LGBTQI+
community is being deliberately targeted by political and religious forces who cloak intolerance in the
language of “values.”
Unlike the other sections, which look inward or backward to memory and ritual for solace, this work offers
no comfort. Instead, it insists on visibility. It is both a warning and a refusal to be erased. The only refuge
here is found in resistance—through protest, through truth-telling, and through the act of making art when
the world demands silence.
ARTIST STATEMENT (Screening Room)
BRANTLEY ELLZEY
REFLECTION + RITUAL + REFUGE
EVERYTHING TURNS
There is a rhythm beneath the visible world, a pattern older than language, deeper than memory.
Everything Turns is a meditation on that turning—on the spiral as both structure and spell.
In this first experimental film by the artist, the act of rolling becomes ritual – a quiet conjuring, a way of
shaping chaos into meaning. The spiral appears not only in nature—in storms, galaxies, seashells—but in
the body, in breath, in grief, in healing. To roll is to draw energy inward. To coil. To contain. To remember.
Connected to the broader exhibition through gesture and material, Everything Turns expands the central
act of rolling into a cosmology—a kinetic ritual that links body to world, past to present, and the personal
to the planetary.
ARTIST STATEMENT (West Gallery)
BRANTLEY ELLZEY
REFLECTION + RITUAL + REFUGE
SPECIAL PROJECTS
Special Projects offers a window into the artist’s expanded practice—a space where ritual meets curiosity,
and art becomes an act of noticing, collecting, and reshaping the world.
Whether documenting found objects unearthed while gathering trash at his inner-city studio, protesting
the silent vandalism of historic buildings through the Memphis Masonry Preservation Society, listing small
acts of love during a year of crisis (Love List 2020), restaging the language of advertising to subvert
power, ready-mades, and intimate portraits of meals shared with his husband, the artist weaves humor,
activism, sensitivity, and critique into a practice rooted in paying attention. These special projects reveal
the artist’s impulse to organize chaos, to ritualize the everyday, and to blur the line between personal
archive and public performance.
Here, photography, social media, and found materials become not just tools—but rituals. This is art as
documentation, as resistance, as a kind of spiritual filing system. There is no hierarchy of material, no
fixed path through the works on display —only the result of a mind mapping meaning through every
detail.
Music + Art
Food + Drinks
Wellness + Retail
LIVE + STAY
EVENTS
Our History
