Elana Herzog
Elana Herzog
Workspace Program Resident 2009
The Workspace residency at Dieu Donné has been a foray into a new world for me – an introduction to a medium that I hope will become an ongoing part of my practice. I’ve used the residency largely as a chance to learn and explore, and as such it has been a luxurious opportunity and a privilege. The program provides a completely hands on experience that is enhanced by the expertise of a professional papermaker. This is the first time I’ve ever worked with a skilled collaborator, or seen the execution of my ideas facilitated by an expert. At the risk of sounding cliché, at the mill I feel like a kid in a candy store. It is filled with a marvelous array of tactile and visual delights in the form of different kinds of pulp, an amazingly brilliant range of color possibilities, and the seemingly magical powers of its presses, stencils, molds and other paraphernalia. It is a celebration of visual and tactile pleasure, and their expressive capability.
My artistic practice consists largely of making mixed media sculpture and installation using found and collected materials. For the past ten years I’ve made most of my work by stapling found textiles—often bedspreads and carpets—to the walls using thousands of metal staples. Parts of the fabric and the staples are then removed and sometimes reapplied, leaving a residue of shredded fabric and perforated wall surface in some areas, and densely stapled and built-up areas elsewhere. Through my experience working with fabric I’ve become I’ve become increasingly interested in the history of the textile industry from a social and technological point of view. I find interesting parallels between the paper and and the textile industry.
My goal in this residency has been to initiate new work that is related to my studio and installation practice, but independent from it. I did not want the connections between these bodies of work to be superficial. I needed to arrive at work whose structural integrity I understand. While in most of my work I am engaged in the deconstruction of existing things, at Dieu Donné I was called upon to actually “make” something “from scratch” using any number of techniques. This residency has given me access to a medium with an artisanal history, which encourages small-scale, intimate work, of which I have done little in recent years.
—Elana Herzog, 2009
In the Studio
About the Artist
Elana Herzog received a BA is from Bennington College and a MFA is from Alfred University. Among her solo and two person exhibitions are those at the Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, Studio 10 in Bushwick, New York, at The Boiler (Pierogi), in Brooklyn, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut; Smack Mellon in New York; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and Diverseworks in Houston, Texas. “De-Warped and Un-Weft,” a survey of Herzog’s work since 1993, was at the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art in Missouri in 2009. Her work has been exhibited internationally in Norway, Sweden and Iceland, Canada, Chile and the Netherlands, and she has participated in numerous group shows at institutions such as the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, New York, the Weatherspoon Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, The Kohler Museum in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and at The Brooklyn Museum and The Museum of Arts and Design New York City.
Herzog has been awarded residencies at the Albers Foundation, in Bethany, Connecticut, Søndre Green Farm in Noresund, Norway.Gertrude Contemporary in Melbourne, Australia, the Farpath Foundation in Dijon, France, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program, LMCC Workspace and Dieu Donne Paper in New York. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020, the Anonymous Was A Woman Award in 2009, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 2007, NYFA Fellowships in 2007 and 1999, the 2004 Lillian Elliot Award, the 2003 Lambent Fund Fellowship and the 1999 Joan Mitchell Award. She has been a lecturer at Yale University since 2012. (Source: John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation)
For more information, please visit their website: https://www.elanaherzog.com