Biography of Elvis Stocco
Elvis Andrew Stocco was born to Italian immigrants descending from the Venice region of Italy. Since the age of three, Stocco has been visiting Italy and admiring his heritage and the canals of Venice. Raised in Toronto, Stocco has always created artworks and began photographing as a toddler using his father's Ricoh camera, a camera that he still occasional uses despite its fixed focus and apparent light leak.
Stocco's artistic education began at York University, where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts with an emphasis on painting/drawing and minors in art history and dance (a career that fortunately ended, due to knee surgery in 1992). While at York, Stocco explored photography in an untraditional manner.
Stocco received a Bachelor of Education from Western University and further artistic study at the University of Toronto. Unwilling to pursue the starving artist tradition, Stocco found the perfect marriage of art and salary by teaching. At St. Peter's Secondary School since 1997, he teaches art, film, and photography for grades 9 to 12. Stocco feels that the experience has been very rewarding; teaching provides him with a fine balance of creativity and growth.
Stocco still considers both painting and photography as his true artistic calling and uses photography as a tool to base his paintings on. As a painter, he has had some success with private and public commissions such as for The Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto. The works in Culture represents Stocco's first use of photography as an artistic end in itself. His interests have also included music and film, with a Charles Street Video Nomination in 1992 for best student film (Dido and Aeneus), an independent CD release in 1993 entitled Spirit, and a cameo appearance in 1999 as Teen Angel in a production of Grease and as the Pharaoh in a 2008 production of Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat. He is currently working on a painting exhibition of figure studies based on the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge.
Stocco has been living in Barrie since 1996 where he is a husband of twelve years and father of two girls. His love and admiration for his family is clear since he describes them as, "three of the most beautiful ladies in the world."
Although Stocco has shown his photographs, paintings, and sculptures in several group shows running between 1991 and 1995, Culture represents the first solo exhibition of his artwork. His influences are widespread and diverse, but as a photographer, he has been influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, and Eugene Atget.