b. 1954
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.
For much of the past 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.
Herzog lives and works in New York City. She holds a BA from Bennington College
and an MFA from Alfred University. Herzog travels frequently to make work, do research and collect materials. She recently spent a month in St. Petersburg, Russia as a Fellow of CEC Artslink's Back Apartment Residency researching Pre-Soviet and Soviet textiles in Russia and Central Asia.
She is a recipient of a 2017 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a 2017 Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant, 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.
For much of the past 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.
Herzog lives and works in New York City. She holds a BA from Bennington College
and an MFA from Alfred University. Herzog travels frequently to make work, do research and collect materials. She recently spent a month in St. Petersburg, Russia as a Fellow of CEC Artslink's Back Apartment Residency researching Pre-Soviet and Soviet textiles in Russia and Central Asia.
She is a recipient of a 2017 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a 2017 Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant, 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.
