Elana Herzog: The Order of Things
September 10 – November 19, 2018

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Elana Herzog is an artist who uses material culture to consider aspects of ephemerality and entropy, pleasure and pain, attraction and repulsion. She has built a visual language that is both formal and evocative, and is increasingly focused on the relationship between technology and culture, the hand and the mind, the mind and the machine. Herzog finds and collects non-precious materials that are often second hand, discarded or cheaply mass produced. Their conversion into “fine art,” as a result of her intervention, immediately raises questions of value, ownership and conservation. Where does value come from and how do we measure it? Can we, and how do we possess it?

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For much the past almost twenty years, Herzog has used thousands of metal staples to embed (and then deconstruct) found textiles into various surfaces, including gallery walls, movable panels and mixed media constructions. Her installations are characterized by a mix of rigorous hard work and playful, context-sensitive experimentation, in which the labor-intensive “making” and “unmaking” is ultimately subsumed into a final product that is light-on-its-feet and almost seems to dissolve.