Opening on Saturday, June 30 from 5-7pm: BUSHEL is pleased to present O Naturale!, an exhibition of new works by Elana Herzog and Molly Stevens. O Naturale! brings together two artists who make formally varied works that use found, made, grown, altered, and manufactured materials to trouble the lines between utility and pleasure, intent and accident, power and submission, appropriation and appreciation.
Stevens paints rocks and refractory bricks, upholsters a stop-sign with lamé snakeskin, and draws illegible but seemingly potent symbols evoking bodies and natural forms that challenge us to acknowledge the messages we may be transmitting without understanding them, and to think about what transformation and vitality mean. Herzog’s sculptures include logs that have been threaded with veins of bright synthetic fabrics and staples, a sensual and attentive gesture that reads as restitution to the trees put to use as telephone poles and stuck with flyers, or those with plastic bags strung in their limbs. The show’s title reflects a productive conflict underlying the works, signified by a pun: Claims of “naturalness” are always a joke, always propaganda, often suffused with historical violence; and yet, what we call the natural world can still be a cause for moments of unbridled delight. In Herzog’s words, finally “It’s all stuff, capable of being cherished and reviled; traded, stolen, blessed, cursed, defiled and discarded.” Herzog and Stevens have shared an artistic dialogue and friendship for years; this is their first two-person show.
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Elana Herzog uses material culture to consider aspects of ephemerality, entropy, pleasure and pain. Her current focus is on the global migrations of culture and technology as seen through the lens of textile. She collects both old and contemporary textile materials gleaned from daily life; these charged materials carry stories, mark time, chart navigations and conquests and form the basis of Herzog’s sculptural installations, in which she blends and translates them into visually dynamic mash-ups that are open to multiple readings. A recipient of a 2017 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Herzog has had solo and two-person exhibitions at the Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut; Smack Mellon in New York; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University; 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. In 2017 she premiered Martha (The Searchers), a ballet by Julia K. Gleich to which she contributed the visual components. She is currently preparing for solo and two-person exhibitions in Connecticut and Chicago, and a group show, Sedimentations: Assemblage as Social Repair, at The 8th Floor in New York City. She lives and works in New York City.
Molly Stevens’s work is not so much concerned with outward images as it is with interiority and transformation. She has described her work as living remains, present and absent, body and landscape. Stevens has exhibited in the United States, Germany and Mexico and has had solo exhibitions at Slag Gallery (Bushwick, NY), Smudajescheck Galerie (Ulm, Germany), Living Arts of Tulsa (Tulsa, OK) and Highways (Santa Monica, CA). Ground, a show of her burlap shrouds, is currently on view through June 10 at Slag Gallery; Amérique, a presentation of her paintings on animal skins and rocks, opened at Atelier Anne-Lise Coste in Vic-le-Fesq, France, in May. Also a translator and book artist, Stevens published the collaborative volume Big Name Artists, a feminist sendup of the art world canon, in 2017. She lives and works in New York and Walton, NY.
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O NATURALE!
Elana Herzog + Molly Stevens
June 30 – July 29, 2018
Opening Reception:
Saturday, June 30, 5-7PM
Open for viewing during Open Hours and events (see the Calendar for event listings), and by appointment. Contact: pr@bushelcollective.org
Opening on Saturday, June 30 from 5-7pm: BUSHEL is pleased to present O Naturale!, an exhibition of new works by Elana Herzog and Molly Stevens. O Naturale! brings together two artists who make formally varied works that use found, made, grown, altered, and manufactured materials to trouble the lines between utility and pleasure, intent and accident, power and submission, appropriation and appreciation. Stevens paints rocks and refractory bricks, upholsters a stop-sign with lamé snakeskin, and draws illegible but seemingly potent symbols evoking bodies and natural forms that challenge us to acknowledge the messages we may be transmitting without understanding them, and to think about what transformation and vitality mean. Herzog’s sculptures include logs that have been threaded with veins of bright synthetic fabrics and staples, a sensual and attentive gesture that reads as restitution to the trees put to use as telephone poles and stuck with flyers, or those with plastic bags strung in their limbs. The show’s title reflects a productive conflict underlying the works, signified by a pun: Claims of “naturalness” are always a joke, always propaganda, often suffused with historical violence; and yet, what we call the natural world can still be a cause for moments of unbridled delight. In Herzog’s words, finally “It’s all stuff, capable of being cherished and reviled; traded, stolen, blessed, cursed, defiled and discarded.” Herzog and Stevens have shared an artistic dialogue and friendship for years; this is their first two-person show.
—
Elana Herzog uses material culture to consider aspects of ephemerality, entropy, pleasure and pain. Her current focus is on the global migrations of culture and technology as seen through the lens of textile. She collects both old and contemporary textile materials gleaned from daily life; these charged materials carry stories, mark time, chart navigations and conquests and form the basis of Herzog’s sculptural installations, in which she blends and translates them into visually dynamic mash-ups that are open to multiple readings. A recipient of a 2017 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Herzog has had solo and two-person exhibitions at the Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut; Smack Mellon in New York; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University; 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. In 2017 she premiered Martha (The Searchers), a ballet by Julia K. Gleich to which she contributed the visual components. She is currently preparing for solo and two-person exhibitions in Connecticut and Chicago, and a group show, Sedimentations: Assemblage as Social Repair, at The 8th Floor in New York City. She lives and works in New York City.
Molly Stevens’s work is not so much concerned with outward images as it is with interiority and transformation. She has described her work as living remains, present and absent, body and landscape. Stevens has exhibited in the United States, Germany and Mexico and has had solo exhibitions at Slag Gallery (Bushwick, NY), Smudajescheck Galerie (Ulm, Germany), Living Arts of Tulsa (Tulsa, OK) and Highways (Santa Monica, CA). Ground, a show of her burlap shrouds, is currently on view through June 10 at Slag Gallery; Amérique, a presentation of her paintings on animal skins and rocks, opened at Atelier Anne-Lise Coste in Vic-le-Fesq, France, in May. Also a translator and book artist, Stevens published the collaborative volume Big Name Artists, a feminist sendup of the art world canon, in 2017. She lives and works in New York and Walton, NY.
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O NATURALE!
Elana Herzog + Molly Stevens
June 30 – July 29, 2018
Opening Reception:
Saturday, June 30, 5-7PM
Open for viewing during Open Hours and events (see the Calendar for event listings), and by appointment. Contact: pr@bushelcollective.org