Elliott Katz: The Purpose of Your Trip

CURATOR ESSAY

Elliott Katz’s first solo museum exhibition, The Purpose of Your Trip, transforms the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center’s historic Ticket Gallery into a poignant reflection on heritage, migration, and self-invention. Katz traces his Japanese American family’s journey across North America—their migration in the 1920s, their internment during World War II, their eventual life in Vermont—and reimagines personal heirlooms and tools as evocative artworks. The exhibition bridges past and present, capturing the ambition and imagination needed to build a meaningful life.

BMAC’s Ticket Gallery acts as a powerful metaphor, representing the movement and regulation of people, whether by choice or by force. A site-specific installation within the exhibition incorporates the historic architecture of BMAC’s building—a former train station—and uses light and the opacity of the windows to conjure an ethereal feeling of the past. The installation incorporates a photograph by Dorothea Lange depicting members of Katz’s family, which Lange took in 1942 while working for the War Relocation Authority as part of her documentation of Japanese Americans in the California internment camps. Katz builds upon Lange’s capturing of daily life for the individuals uprooted from their homes to highlight his own family’s story and their search for stability, as well as the difficulty of understanding and relating to historical events such as these.

Katz’s sculptures transform commonplace objects into human scaled, charged works of beauty and disorientation. They embody a sense of transience, such as a replica of the suitcase that Katz’s great-grandfather James Usaburo Yamasaki (Ji-chan) carried into the Manzanar internment camp in 1942. Katz transforms the suitcase’s original twill fabric pattern into alternating sections of precious woods—black walnut, sapele, and ash—and renders his great-grandfather’s detainee number and signature as a gilded emblem. The original suitcase is one of the few possessions Katz has from his family history, and it serves as a reminder of that turbulent era. 

Further integrating art with architecture, Katz has temporarily replaced the existing cabinetry hardware in the Ticket Gallery with a collection of new bronze drawer pulls, molded directly from his maternal grandparents’ barber tools—scissors, straight razor, comb—as well as a pair of bullets. Both grandparents worked as barbers, took pride in stylish haircuts—the ones they gave to others and their own—and used their shop as a vital gathering place for Japanese Americans in rural southern New Jersey. 

The title of the exhibition, The Purpose of Your Trip, is drawn from the question Katz must routinely answer at the Canadian border each week as he crosses into Quebec to visit his partner and son, who live in Montreal. In the exhibition, a replica of Katz’s passport is placed beside a replica of his son’s soccer ball: two personal objects created using the Japanese art of kintsugi. This technique, which highlights rather than hides the cracks and the seams of broken and connected items, symbolizes the emotional and physical realities of a family separated by a national border while also honoring the connection between them.

The shovel is a recurring symbol in Katz’s artistic practice. In “Double Helix Shovels,” the simple tool is reworked to make it less functional and more imaginary. Katz draws upon the shape and structure of a DNA molecule to direct our attention to the interconnected family themes of the overall exhibition, showing the viewer how he has acknowledged and grappled with some of the inherited traumas, behaviors, and skills of his elders.  

“Enso” references the Japanese Zen Buddhist symbol: a circle drawn in ink with only one or two brushstrokes to represent impermanence and the ongoing journey of growth. Embracing the wabi-sabi aesthetic, which finds beauty in imperfection, Katz reimagines the enso using an axe that he has altered—an object circling back on itself in a direct visualization of the destruction that is necessary for ongoing cycles of change and creation.

All the objects in The Purpose of Your Trip reflect the complexity of Katz’s grandparents’ lives, shaped by war, displacement, and a deep commitment to human dignity. At the same time, they speak to the life Katz is actively building today: one rooted in care, creativity, and the ongoing pursuit of a world that values big, open, and independent thinking. 

— DJ Hellerman, curator

ARTIST STATMENT

I am a sculptor whose practice bridges traditional craftsmanship and contemporary technology. Working with a wide range of materials, I combine time-honored techniques such as woodworking and metal casting with digital tools like CAD modeling and CNC machining. This evolving continuum energizes my studio, offering both ongoing learning and greater efficiency.

A hybrid approach also informs my efforts to modernize community arts institutions. For the past decade, I’ve helped update traditional arts and crafts facilities with automated toolsets, expanding the capacity of shared creative spaces. These experiences have shaped my own process and deepened my commitment to building accessible, future-forward environments for making.

While much of my practice has emphasized material exploration and public engagement, this exhibition turns inward. The Purpose of Your Trip references the question I’m regularly asked when crossing the U.S.-Canada border to visit my partner and son in Montreal. This work marks a shift toward exploring my personal history—an exercise that feels both necessary and uncomfortable. Unexpectedly, it has shown me that my unconventional lifestyle choices reflect a deeper search for cultural grounding.

This personal inquiry unfolds amid broader social pressures. As a working artist in Vermont, I find it increasingly difficult to access stable housing, childcare, and education. My family’s cross-border lifestyle, though imperfect, feels workable for now. That small sense of stability gives me hope that future generations can honor their histories while forging lives marked by curiosity and joy.

Beneath this work runs a deeper thread: my family’s experience with post–World War II internment. That legacy continues to shape my practice. The Purpose of Your Trip builds on a long-term inquiry that began in 2017 with Byōbu, an installation I created with my grandmother, Alice Yamasaki, a traditionally trained Japanese dancer. That project—and this one—represent chapters in an ongoing exploration that will continue well beyond the close of this show in March 2026.

— Elliott Katz

This exhibit is supported in part by BMAC’s Wolf Kahn & Emily Mason Exhibition Endowment Fund.

ABOUT THE CURATOR

DJ Hellerman is the deputy director and senior curator at Museum of Contemporary Art (moCa) Cleveland, where he is responsible for setting and implementing moCa’s curatorial vision, bringing moCa’s mission to life through strategic and collaborative partnerships. Previously, he served as the chief curator and director of Curatorial Affairs at The Fabric Workshop & Museum in Philadelphia, where he led research and implementation of artist-centered projects, exhibitions, and programming. 

Hellerman focuses on helping ideas find material form through collaboration, experimentation, and process over product. He builds relationships based on trust, effective communication, and vulnerability, which  allow for the openness and intimacy that are essential in creating meaningful work. Collaborating with artists across context-sensitive, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary projects, Hellerman prioritizes artistic process; the relationship between art, technology, and spirituality; place-based art making; early use of video as an art form; and the development of alternative cultural institutions.

Recent exhibitions that Hellerman has curated include Harminder Judge: Bootstrap Paradox; Soft/Cover; Henry Taylor: Nothing Change, Nothing Strange; Jayson Musson: His History of Art; Doreen Lynette Garner: Pale In Comparison; Ira Lombardia: VOID; YOKO ONO: REMEMBERING THE FUTURE; Strata: Frank Gillette and Suzanne Anker, co-curated with David Ross; Jeff Donaldson: Dig; Vanessa German: de.structive dis.tillation; Adam Milner: Late Night Space Force; Edie Fake: Structures Shift; T.R. Ericsson: I Was Born To Bring You Into This World; Björn Schülke: Traveling Spy; and Mildred Beltré: DreamWork.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Elliott Katz (b.1983) grew up on a vegetable and ornamental plant farm in rural Vermont. He and his siblings formed the backbone of the hired help, and by the time he was 6, he was slogging buckets of carrots and potatoes from the fields to the farm stand. This personal history informed Katz’s early sculptures in which craft was used not only as a method of production but also as a metaphor to connect past and present lives. He draws connections between working on a farm and working in a studio, as both require prolonged investments of time and a particular resourcefulness. Katz received his Bachelor of Art from Colby College and his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Connecticut.

RELATED EVENTS

November 15, Saturday, 5 p.m. — Opening of New Exhibits

RELATED RESOURCES

Installation views (coming soon)
Virtual tour (coming soon)
Ask the Artist!