Elana Herzog is a mixed-media installation artist who has exhibited widely nationally and internationally. She produced a large project in Tbilisi, Georgia, funded in part by the Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant, for Artisterium 10, an annual exhibition of international artists. In November 2017 she premiered Martha (The Searchers), a ballet by Julia Gleich to which she contributed the sets. Her solo exhibitions include the Sharjah Art Museum in United Arab Emirates, and Studio 10 and The Boiler (Pierogi) in Brooklyn.
Elana Herzog deconstructs and reconstructs carpets, blankets, and other woven textiles to consider aspects of ephemerality, entropy, pleasure, and pain. Focused on global migrations of culture and technology, she researches the ways people and materials relocate, transforming domestic and institutional environments over time. Wherever she travels, she collects old and new textile materials gleaned from daily life: stuff that carries stories, marks time, and charts navigations and conquests. These charged materials form the basis of sculptural installations, where she translates them into visually dynamic mashups that are open to multiple readings.
At MacDowell, Herzog worked on several mixed-media assemblages combining materials sourced in and around Peterborough, and those which she had collected previously in other locations. Some of these pieces were shown in a solo exhibition, “The Order of Things,” at the Contemporary Art Galleries of the University of Connecticut in 2018. She was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2017.
