Elana Herzog

Dewarped and Unweft

            For the past 10 years, Elana Herzog has been creating impressive interventions out of ripped and otherwise deconstructed domestic fabrics that seem to grow seamlessly out of a room's corners, cling to a supporting column or hang (via thousands of industrial staples) from a wall. What most people don't know is that Herzog accomplishes the lion's share of her labour-intensive activity in the studio. There, equipped with Sheetrock panels, a pneumatic staple gun and a large supply of cotton tablecloths and chenille bedspreads, Herzog has time to work and plan for the installation. On-site, the Sheetrock is hung, and many more hours are spent augmenting and adjusting details. The final effect is almost magical, as though a vast, somewhat wild garden had grown in the gallery quite spontaneously.

Dewarped and Unweft

 

 

            Extending the discourse into three dimensions, Herzog uses a combination of layered wood, textiles and stapled surfaces to create freestanding and wall mounted sculptures, which reveal the versatility of her visual language. These pieces play with relationships between sculptural and pictorial space. They invoke landscapes, aerial views, and strata. As ever, Herzog is extremely interested in the evocative power of every day things, repetition and variation, and relationships between positive and negative space.

 W(e)ave

            Elana Herzog is one of several artists working today whose installations draw from the pared down traditions of minimalism and the bravura experimentation of arte povera. Her works involve the artist’s improvisational, performative action in their construction. Herzog’s practice is to attach distressed discarded textiles such as old bedspreads, tablecloths or carpets directly to a wall using hundreds of metal staples. She then tears away at the fabric and selectively reapplies these cloth shreds with more staples, arriving at progressively dematerialized works she terms “sculptural drawings.” The heavily built-up areas of cloth and dense patterns of metal staples play against the skin of the bare, perforated gallery wall, suggesting the precarious physical presence of her constructions. They are simultaneously being made and unmade, new forms emerging from the remains of the old.

 

W(e)ave /details/

            Though Herzog’s initial inspiration derives from the monolithic rectangles of Sixties abstract painting, she proceeds to challenge modernism’s conventions of the integrity of the object by injecting references to the violent disregard and destruction of the planar surface. She describes her debt to modernism as both reverent and irreverent.

Civilization and its Discontents /detail/

            The Aftermath of Warp and Weft. There’s something mysterious about Elana Herzog’s fabric works, embedded as they are, seamlessly within the gallery walls. Are they the remnants of some violent event that occurred in the room overnight, before we arrived? Let’s consider, for a moment, other forms of art that appear to us as magically, virtuosically, in-situ — Renaissance frescoes, for instance, painted quickly and expertly into wet plaster, or urban murals that appear out of nowhere, covered with portraits or Wild Style graffiti. We, as viewers, know we’re expected to marvel in their construction, their poetic authorship, at how they seem to transcend the plain, resolute, impassivity of the architecture. But Herzog’s fabrics have struck some sort of quiet, Faustian bargain with their support. The walls of the gallery are no longer simple, reassuring structures; and the otherwise pleasant, domestic fabrics impaled upon them are no longer a source of comfort. In their construction and underlying structure, the pieces we see here are honest — almost to a fault.

Civilization and its Discontents

            Utilizing a pneumatic stapler to affix textiles to walls, Elana Herzog creates one surface from two. Proceeding in an expressive method akin to drawing, she places and pulls out staples, removes and shreds bits of fabric, and reapplies both until a dematerialized image emerges. “When I feel my spine tingle, I go with that”, she says. In her works, fabrics adorn and dissolve into walls, with the woven pattern of the fabric a mere memory in her final composition. Sometimes dense staples stand in for fabric on the grid of a weave; in other areas, the staples break out on their own, acting as silver lines on white space. The evidence of aggressive textile tearing and distressed wall marking offers poetic moments, as when a long fabric tendrils curls into the air or surprisingly voluminous fold pushes out from the wall beside a conspicuously flat empty space.

 In Practice Projects

            After receiving her MFA from SUNY Alfred in 1979, Herzog created mixed-media sculpture for almost ten years before turning to utilitarian textiles as her materials of focus. Her first work with textiles consists of a wooden kitchen table altered by cutting, and a long peace of knotted, sheer fabric hanging bellow the table and snaking along the floor. Given the table’s anthropomorphic character and the evocative quality of the twisted fabric, the title ‘Rapunzel’ (1990) is fitting. Since that work, Herzog has been using sheets, bedspreads, rugs, draperies and curtains to make her sculptural works and architectural interventions.

Plaid /detail/                                Projected

            While some of her works suggest paintings by maintaining the rectangular form of found blankets, curtains and carpets, other suggests sculpture in the way she uses yardage to involve and interact with space. To extend the piece among multiple surfaces, she subtly alters gallery spaces building objects such as horizontal platforms, ceiling-high piers, or low partition forms. Uniting the forms with the fabric, Herzog is then able to create dynamic vertical and horizontal elements around the perimeter of the room and into the gallery space. With tiny square fabric networks reminiscent of city models placed up high, down low, and unpredictable shapes, her installations recall both a modern grid and a contained, in-progress construction site. Viewers experience exquisite, ever shifting panoramas as they walk through what is essentially a three-dimensional plaid environment.

Plaid

            Elana Herzog lives and works in New York City. She has a BA from Bennington College and an MFA from Alfred University. Herzog was the 2012 Fellow of the Saint-Gaudens Memorial in Cornish, New Hampshire along with a solo exhibit. Other venues include a survey at the Daum Museum, MO, the Aldrich Museum, CT, the Tang Museum, NY, Museum of Art and Design, NY, Weatherspoon Museum, NC, Brooklyn Museum, NY, the Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University, CT, Reykjavik Art Museum, Iceland, Konsthalle Goteborg, Sweden and at Konstahalle Gustavsbergs, and Tegnerforbundet in Norway, among other venues. She is a lecturer at Yale Univeristy. Herzog is preparing for a two-person exhibition, with Linda Herrit, at The Pierogi Boiler for the Fall of 2014, and for a residency at the Josef and Annie Albers Foundation.

Civilization and its Discontents

            Her numerous honours include an Anonymous Was A Woman Award, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, two Individual Artists Fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant.

            You can view more of her work on her website:

            http://www.elanaherzog.com/

Into the Fray                            Romancing the Rock

W(e)ave                           Rose Series #2    

Untitled                                 Plaid

 

Civilization and its Discontents     Dewarped and Unweft /detail/ 

Dewarped and Unweft

Elana Herzog

Kirsty Mitchell

Gaia, The Birth Of An End

     Kirsty Mitchell was born and raised in the English county of Kent, known to many as the ‘Garden of England’. Growing up, art became Kirsty’s sole passion. The imagination and belief in beauty became her root, and the place she constantly try to returns to in her work. She studied until 25, taking courses in the history of art, photography, fine art, and then on to train in ‘Costume for Performance’ at the London College of Fashion. Having graduated and worked for a short time in the industry, Kristy decided to further her education, returning to university and completing a first class degree with honours in Fashion design, at Ravensbourne College of Art in the summer of 2001. During this time Kirsty completed two internships at the design studios of Alexander McQueen and Hussein Chalayan.

The Ghost Swift

     Since then, Kirsty has worked full time as a senior designer for a global fashion brands, until 2007 when personal illness brought a sudden change, and led her to pick up a camera. Photography became a passion, and gave her new purpose.

            Mitchell's fondest childhood memories are of her mother Maureen, a schoolteacher, reading fairy tales aloud. These tales of imagination, beauty and love followed Mitchell throughout whole her life. Her mother passed away of a brain tumour in 2008, leading Mitchell on a creative journey through ethereal lands and personal memories. The photographer has created a new world in her mother's memory, rich with intricate detail and drama. Her work reminds us that the real world is not the only world, if you allow your imagination to take hold. 

The Queen's Centurion

     She retreated behind the lens of her camera and created Wonderland, an ethereal fantasy world. The photographic series began as a small summer project but grew into an inspirational creative journey.

     'Real life became a difficult place to deal with, and I found myself retreating further into an alternative existence through the portal of my camera,' said the artist.
'This escapism grew into the concept of creating an unexplained storybook without words, dedicated to my mother, that would echo the fragments of the fairytales she read to me constantly as a child.'

A Forgotten Tale

     To realize her visions, Kirsty, collaborated with hair and make-up artist Elbie Van Eeden. In the beginning, both were in full time jobs so they spent evenings and weekends creating props, wigs, and sets on a shoestring budget and shot in the woodlands surrounding Kirsty's home in Surrey. She developed a deep bond and respect for the locations in which she was working and strove, through her pictures, to 'remind others of their forgotten magic and beauty'. 

A Most Beautiful Dead

     She became fascinated with pockets of wild flowers such as the bluebells that would appear for only a few brief weeks of the year. In some cases, she would wait a full 12 months so she could shoot costumes matched to the vivid colours of nature.

      'All the characters came to me in my dreams,' she explained, but she delighted in the chance to step into the scenes for real: 'after all, it's not often you get to stand beside an eight foot princess in the rain, or witness the dawn with a dancing circus girl on stilts!'

The White Queen                     The Fall of Gammelyn

     The resulting images looked so hyper-real that it was assumed that they were created in Photoshop. Many people believed the photographs were shot all around the world, when in reality they were taken in locations within short drives of her Surrey home.

            Kirsty began to write diary accounts and blog behind-the-scenes shots about the creation of each photograph. 'My aim was to portray time passing, an unsaid journey through four seasons, incorporating every colour in the rainbow’. As things progressed, her costumes became more elaborate with the props and new characters often taking up to five months to create. 'The project blossomed into our own private playground,' she said.

The Arrival Of Gaia

     In the words of Mitchell, Wonderland is a “storybook without words”. The series, made up of 69 images with 10 more in the making, has been completely self-funded and every single character is product of Mitchell’s imagination. A incredible imagination that gathers faded memories of stories read to her by her mother, book illustrations, poems, paintings and dreams and mixes everything to construct a detailed and singular fairy tale world. “The costumes, props, sets and accessories, are all a vital part of the process that is finally recorded in the finished product of the photograph. This physical creation is my favourite part, and has taken me to places I would have otherwise never known. I have walked on snow covered in flowers, stood in lakes at sunset, painted trees, set fire to chairs, made smoking umbrellas, and giant wigs from stolen flowers.”

The Garden of Whispered Wishes

     Mitchell’s unique approach to portrait photography shows the deep influence of her 10 year career as a costume and fashion designer. Everything framed by her camera is real, including the intricate costumes that are specifically designed and constructed for each character she creates. All the elements are shown in real scale, all the props exist and are handmade by her, and the locations are natural settings found in the woodlands around her home. Her extraordinary technique creates otherworldly scenes without the need of Photoshop, cloning or digital add-ons.

The Briar Rose                 The Beautiful Blindness of Devotion

     The artist describes her photography as ‘fantasy for real’. She spends months meticulously handcrafting her characters costumes and props to coincide with the complex narrative she imagined. But the actual shoot may take months or years to complete since it must coincide with the exact season or weather conditions that the character and scene calls for. The photo shoots are elaborate, similar to a miniature movie set, with lighting and assistants.

Moondial

     In order to share her incredible production over the 5 years it took to produce them, each of the images is accompanied by a 5 minute film, which shows the intense and meticulous work that it requires. For those who cannot believe that these images are real and created without digital intervention, Mitchell’s diary offers a detailed and up-close account of the entire project.

http://www.kirstymitchellphotography.com/diary/

More of her works can be seen on her website:

http://www.kirstymitchellphotography.com/

Danaus

She'll Wait For You In The Shadows Of Summer

The Voyage                             Vortex      

The Queen's Armada

In the process                                 Gaia's Promise

The Patience Of Trees

The White Witch                           The Fairy Cake Godmother

Portrait Of A Princess

Kirsty Mitchell

 
                 The Making of the ‘The Ghost Swift’