Elana Herzog.

Shut the front door! Just as I thought I’ve seen it all, along comes the work of New York based artist Elana Herzog. I think that this is so beautiful, that I kinda almost don’t know what to say about it. But I think I’ll manage somehow.

For the past ten years, Elana has created most of her pieces by stapling found textiles to walls using thousands of metal staples. She first attaches textiles, mostly bedspreads and carpets, then removes them, and at times reapplies them. This process leaves a combination of part delicately shredded fabric residue on walls, and part thick built-up areas of staples and textile. Elana calls this work “sculptural drawings” where these pieces create an illusion of simultaneously emerging from and disappearing into the wall.

This is what Elana has to say about her work:

My materials, often cheap, tacky, or discarded household items and fabric, challenge conventions of taste and beauty and draw attention to how art and design migrate throughout culture, from high to low and back again, reinterpreted by industry to meet the needs of different markets and trends. My work negotiates a thin line between attraction and repulsion, pain and pleasure, vulgar and sublime. I am fascinated by the way form is generated by growth and decay, construction and destruction. My work has a relationship to Modernism which is both reverent and irreverent. This is the language I grew up with, but have never felt ownership of. To the extent that I operate from a position of alienation, my relationship to both high and low culture remains vicarious.

Extreme love of epic proportions.

[Images via Elana Herzog’s website and LMAK projects.]