Seventy-six years. That’s the average life span of a white male in Tennessee. Artist Brantley Ellzey has lived 63 of them, and he’s seen those years quantified into days in one of his latest pieces, Diary, on display in his current Crosstown Arts exhibit.
For the 22,995 days lived, he rolled 22,995 small pieces of construction paper, dating them with vintage rubber stamps from his birthday on April 1, 1962, to March 31, 2024. These rolls, in turn, sit behind glass in 63 panels labeled by corresponding year. Another 13 panels remain empty — “because I haven’t lived that part of my life yet,” Ellzey says. “Of course, when March 31st rolls around, I will have another one to add to my wall here.”
These rolls will be in black as the rest are, “not because it’s somber or funereal, but quite frankly, we do burn through our days. We live a day and go on to the next one.”
Diary, he says, is about perspective, an opportunity to reflect, not just for Ellzey but for anyone who can project their own life onto the panels, their days, too, quantified in the black rolls. “What I’ve found is that when people look at this, they really do say, ‘Oh my goodness, I’ve been married that long?’ or ‘My child was born this year.’
It frees it up to be a universal monument to life.”
Indeed, throughout his “Reflection+Ritual+Refuge,” Ellzey uncovers the universal in the personal and, in other instances, the personal in the universal, through familiar materials like magazines or wrapping paper or even rolls of crime scene tape. His work in each of the three gallery spaces and the screening room at Crosstown begs for connection, for a reckoning of the rituals and acts that help us survive in a time of discontent.
“This show I knew was going to open after the Trump election,” Ellzey says. “Regardless of which side of the political spectrum you’re on, there’s this turmoil and constant kind of grinding and chaos, not only with the future of our country but things like AI and all the anxiety surrounding that. So I thought, ‘How do I do something where I can not only process this zeitgeist for myself, but also bring something to the world that helps other people?’
“I realized a lot of that is reflecting on the current problems, but also trying to remember that there have always been problems. When I was a little kid, there was Vietnam and that was dividing the country. There were horrible acts of violence surrounding that in addition to the AIDS crisis, which had a big impact on me at age 20.”
And so came the idea of reflection. Then came the idea of ritual, where, as his artist statement says, “repetition becomes remembrance.” “And then the refuge,” Ellzey says, “it’s the product of those two. By making this personal, it would encourage other people to think about their own ways of dealing with trauma.”
The Architect
Prior to “Reflection+Ritual+Refuge,” Crosstown Arts hosted Ellzey’s “SWEET,” which opened in October 2016. “So it was before the Hillary Clinton election, where she was running against Trump,” he says. “And we were in this news cycle of constant conflict.”
Yet that show was optimistic. His signature rolls of paper were all brightly colored, drawing inspiration from children’s books and bold and fanciful works from the likes of Disney animation studios. Of the show then, Elle Perry wrote for the Flyer, “One gets the feeling immediately that he or she is being transported back in time to a vintage candy shop.”
However, for this show, which opened in October 2025, also in a time of ongoing conflict, Ellzey takes a different approach, but rather than turning to pessimism, the total opposite of “SWEET,” he turns to a contemplative tone, searching for answers in our reality while bearing witness to the past.
The three gallery spaces and screening room of “Reflection+Ritual+Refuge,” which take on titles of “Spiral Architectures” in the East Gallery, “Reflections” in the East Atrium, and “Special Projects” in the West Gallery, make room for this exploration on a scale Ellzey hasn’t been able to achieve before.
More often than not, Crosstown Arts uses its gallery spaces at Crosstown Concourse to present multiple exhibits at once, rather than having one artist occupy all of them, but Ellzey was ready to take on the opportunity. “Most of my practice is commission-based, or it has been,” he says. “I did a great big commission for a corporate client and I love that scale of taking the tiny module of the rolled paper piece, and then doing this giant piece out of the rolled paper. So that got me thinking that I would love to do a piece that’s my own, not a commission, and that is big in scale.”
Of this vision, Ellzey then adds, “People say, ‘Oh, well, that’s a man’s ego,’ right?
“But it’s like when I see bricks on a building, especially a massive building, and you think that building is made out of this tiny little component, all joined together. So I think that’s a good analogy for using these little rolls to do something big.”
In making this comparison, Ellzey reveals a bit of his past: For the majority of his career, he worked as an architect, a job that demands precision, repetition, and structure — all of which appear in his work as an artist using rolled paper sculpturally. “It’s a lot of preplanning,” he says of his rolled paper work. In a piece like his Thought We Knew (For Martha Moore), which takes rolled pages and images from a set of 1962’s World Book Encyclopedia and layers them in a grid-like form, “essentially just building it up layer by layer,” he says. “These are very much like building models. I use white archival glue and triangles and things to try to keep things straight. … I got all this training when I was in architecture.”
Ellzey experimented with rolled paper for the first time not as an artist, but as an architect in the ’90s, building furniture as part of his work. It was then he remembered a woman who made crafts of rolled magazine paper in his childhood hometown of Osceola, Arkansas. “She would take ice cream buckets from ice cream parlors and then surround them with the rolled paper,” he says. “And when I was a little kid, I saw one of those, and I just thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. It was colorful, and my mom got me one for my birthday — she had her make me a little yellow garbage can.
“And so I kept it in my room and I just thought it was so cool.
“So I started thinking, it’d be interesting to use that rolled paper as sort of a finish, like on a tabletop, and either put it under glass or coat it with resin or something, but it’d be so colorful. And with wooden furniture, paper’s made out of wood, so it just seemed fitting.”
With this idea, Ellzey began rolling magazine pages, but he never made anything of it. “I got really busy.”
Fortunately, though, he was eventually invited to do an art show with the theme of shelter. Instead of doing a drawing of a house or a typical model as an architect might, he thought of that rolled paper put aside and decided to make a model from pages of Martha Stewart of Living.
“It dawned on me that it wasn’t only a decorative thing, but in this process of rolling up the paper, I was archiving it,” the artist says. “I was creating this storage for all of this information, and, oh, I can use a specific publication for a specific piece thematically.
“Part of the show [especially in ‘Spiral Architectures’ where the rolled paper dominates] was really trying to place the rolled paper in the context of bigger things and why I’m attracted to them, as a process and as an important material.”
The Auteur
Ellzey’s work — collecting, cutting, rolling, planning — is time-consuming and repetitive in nature. He tightly winds each paper after paper around a wooden dowel so often that the process has become muscle-memory to the artist even as it requires a keen and active focus. It’s meditative and ritualistic, he says. “The entire time I’m doing it, I’m thinking about the piece and what it’s going to be.”
“Everything Turns,” Ellzey’s first-ever experimental short film shown in the screening room, meditates further on the act of rolling, demonstrating its prevalence in nature, like in storms and galaxies. In the film, edited by Laura Jean Hocking with a score by the Flyer’s Alex Greene, rolling is seen as “a cosmology — a kinetic ritual that links body to world, past to present, and the personal to the planetary,” Ellzey’s artist statement reads.
In that vein, for many of his pieces in “Spiral Architectures,” which are dedicated to people in his personal life who have impacted him, from his husband to his fourth-grade teacher, each roll takes on a special meaning, as he archives the memory of that person. For Paper Moon (For Mrs. Harrison), he rolled sheets of vintage music bequeathed to him by his childhood piano teacher, who, in addition to music, taught him about culture. “By the time I was in high school, my lessons were probably less about piano and more about her saying, ‘I want to talk to you about this show that just opened on Broadway.’”
In his series The Male Gays, Coming of Age in the Shaow of AIDS, dedicated to four friends lost to AIDS, he uses pages from vintage Playgirl and men’s fashion magazines, which harken to his own coming of age in the ’70s in Arkansas. “When I hit adolescence, I had no idea what a gay person was. I had some frame of reference from people calling people names, disparaging that. But I didn’t really know, oh, there are actually gay people in the world that live their lives and fall in love. And when you’re in that environment, you don’t know really who you are. You know that you have to hide aspects of yourself.
And when you’re in a little town like that, you really want to fit in. And I had wonderful parents and wonderful friends when I was growing up. But there was still that part of me that felt different.”
“So these pieces are about that experience in a visual way. So my house, because of having the older brothers, the images I saw of men were primarily sports related.
“And Sports Illustrated, baseball magazines, all of that. So I never really saw a representation of men [like me],” Ellzey says. “And these, in my mind, are a celebration, but they’re also a memorial.”
Another aspect, Ellzey points out, is his use in this piece and others of rolled mylar, a polyester film with a reflective surface. “That is a very literal interpretation of the ‘Reflection’ theme of the show,” he says.
His pieces in the “Reflections” space — a title that nods to the former Memphis gay bar of the same name — are entirely made of this mirrored mylar, rolled in a way that makes the surface ripple and fracture. “The mirrored mylar,” Ellzey’s artist statement reads, “refuses to offer a perfect reflection; instead, it bends the familiar into the uncanny, revealing how fragile and flexible our realities truly are.”
The mylar also brings more movement to certain pieces, Ellzey adds. In Sissy (For Nita and Terri), skirtlike forms, made of Vogue magazine pages and mylar, seem to swing and vibrate across the background of more rolled pages and mylar. “It’s really about just dancing around and being yourself and being happy,” he says of the piece, a tribute to his cousins who welcomed him as a child into “girl world.” “And it’s called Sissy in an attempt to reclaim that word. I was terrified of it; that would be the last thing I would want anyone to call me. And now, when I see a little kid, whether it’s a little butch girl or a little feminine boy, I think to myself, ‘Be the best sissy you can be.’”
Things have definitely changed in terms of LGBTQ-acceptance, Ellzey recognizes, yet he can’t ignore the reality of the United States where legislators are actively seeking to reverse any progress made. His 2025 Project series features rolled silhouette targets to represent those at risk of systemic and systematic violence brought on by this regime. Ellzey’s sculptural pieces in his “Special Projects” exhibit also reflect on the current political climate of violence, offering commentary on the immigration detention center Alligator Alcatraz and the January 6th insurrection.
“It would have been false to ignore the way I’m feeling [about this reality],” Ellzey says, “[but] to me, these memories [embedded throughout his work, in those rolled pieces and others] help me deal with that.”
The Archivist
While Ellzey’s rolled materials are his calling card, “Special Projects” brings in work outside of his rolling practice. It’s a space, as his artist statement says, “where ritual meets curiosity and art becomes an act of noticing, collecting, and reshaping the world.”
Featured prominently in this space is his #thingsifindatmystudio series, a ritualistic practice of his where he photographs litter found around his studio on Summer Avenue. “The idea is preserving this sort of pregentrified neighborhood in a visually compelling way,” Ellzey says.
Continuing that theme of preservation and archivation are his side-by-side photographs of him and his husband Jim Renfrow taken over the course of year at various restaurants, as well as his Love List 2020, a project begun in 2020 as a sort of daily reflection on something — anything — that Ellzey could find positivity in, from his dog to beloved songs to the cashew nut.
Within these acts of noticing, Ellzey reflects on being noticed, too. His Art. For the People. banner on display at the entrance at the “Special Projects” began as a billboard proposed to replace the one in front of his Summer Avenue studio, to draw attention to his studio. In the style of city lawyer billboards, it features Ellzey proudly posing beside a largely printed 774-ARTWORK phone number. “The line is fully functional, routes directly to my cellphone, and will now serve as the primary number for my practice — promoting my own work and events alongside other art happenings throughout Memphis,” Ellzey posted on Facebook.
That post also shared that the project was initially to be funded by the city of Memphis’ agency “tasked with helping small businesses improve safety in high-risk areas.” The billboard, the artist said, would have improved the studio’s appearance while restoring internal illumination to increase safety, but funding was withdrawn for not meeting “modern standards.” “The project stalled not because it lacked clarity, purpose, or public benefit, but because of a bureaucratic system unwilling to recognize experimental art, or to acknowledge that an art studio is a small business with the same need for safety and infrastructure as any other,” Ellzey claims.
While there is no billboard on Summer Avenue, just the banner canvas in Crosstown Arts’ gallery, Art. For the People., was and is about accessibility in art, Ellzey says. That mission of accessibility also is what drove him to partnering with Crosstown Arts. “Crosstown,” he says, “is such a big place and so many people are here.
“I love the fact that people come back for repeated viewings.”
While Ellzey has gotten messages and calls in praise of his work, it’s not about the attention for him. “It’s really great when you realize that your work has an impact on someone,” he says. “I did a commission at West Clinic several years ago, and I hate it that people are out there, but I get calls: ‘This is the worst day of my life that I’m looking at your art, and it’s making it so much better.’ You don’t really know how people are going to react to what you’re doing.”
The hope, though, is to create something memorable, something worth reflecting on and connecting to, something worth noticing.
Join Crosstown Arts for an artist talk with Brantley Ellzey on January 17, 2026, at 1 p.m. “Reflection+Ritual+Refuge” is on display through January 25th.