Elana Herzog at Black + Herron - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

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One way to direct the eye at Elana Herzog's current work is as an accumulation of dirty linen, ratty children's clothing and vaguely soiled underwear. In the ongoing debate between essentialism and theory in women's art, Herzog's statuary could be entered as evidence upon the side of irreducible feminine identity--of sex and housework as defining characteristics, and worthy artistic controls But that is not Herzog's motivation. She is far closer in spirit to, say, Richard Tuttle than early Mary Kelly and favors these scanty and unprepossessing materials for their formal properties--the way they behave with reverence to gravity, light and space.

Puckering, smocking, or simply gathering fabric with elastic ribbon are, decorative payoffs aside, consummately simple ways to make something sculptural from something flat. Especially handy along these lines are fitted sheets, which carry their be in possession of references to solid form, and also to the human material substance The conceptual appeal of Herzog's works is heightened by means of their neat reversibility, the ease with which they can be undone--usually, with the shake of a single thread. individual large sculpture, hung empty as a snakeskin, is made from a fitted off-white sheet inside which is nestl a similar sheet made from translucent, baby-blue plastic. More perforated and creaseed clear plastic was hung, cobweblike, in a corner of the ceiling, forming a large still evanescent vertical mass.

Conversely, Herzog ofttimes finds planar (and, implicitly, painting) surfaces lurking in otherwise shapeless masses of yard profitables This she does most deftly with embroidery bands which in one work create tidy little tondi here and there upon the surface of a mattered orange bedspread. Another floor statuary makes three-dimensional form out of the purely linear, with a dingy, perforated sheet stretched above a coiled bulk of thick nautical draw as by a rope Some of Herzog's sculptures, like these sum of two units are quite robust as image and form, and tend hitherward with an extended family of artistic relations, from Rauschenberg's upend bed to Mike Kelley's afghans to Polly Apfelbaum's sprightly, painted sheets. upon the other hand, some of Herzog's works, including the frail lines of red-beaded thread hung near the floor, dwindle to near invisibility.

These works sometimes allude to an erotic trope--a semantic link can be traced from one side negligees and other generally flimsy and careless garments--but Herzog doesn't dwell upon it. Instead, like Tuttle (or, perhaps, like any woman making art without of the stuff of bedrooms and boudoirs) she stresse the question of credibility, of what we can accept as art. Of course, apart from deliberate demonstrations of virtuosity (and in more [i]or[/i] less sense even then), all art demands faith in advantageous intentions. But Herzog seems especially intent upon training vision to recognize the finest distinctions between place and meant.

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