Happening Now
January 18, 2025
to April 26, 2025
Using the Jewish Studio Process, we’ll gather in textual inquiry and art-making, and nourish ourselves with deep play.
An event for artists and cultural workers to come together and connect!
View the exhibition Elana Herzog at Koffler Arts with remarks and a tour.
Light refreshments will be served. Kashrut observed.
Free. Registration form coming soon!
In partnership with UJA Federation of Greater Toronto, CANVAS, the Kultura Collective and Koffler Arts.
About the exhibition:
Koffler Arts is excited to welcome Toronto-born, Brooklyn-based artist Elana Herzog to our gallery for a solo exhibition (February 13 – May 11), curated by artist Jessica Stockholder. The exhibition surveys Herzog’s thirty five-year career, and features a new site responsive installation made using wallpaper designed by the artist, metal staples, textiles, and paint.
Herzog uses collected materials, each with their own history, that she cuts, staples, reassembles, and transforms. The fabrics are gathered over years of collecting and thrifting internationally and locally, and range from 80’s chenille bedding to mass produced nylon prints inspired by traditional Russian floral textiles. When collaged, patched, and sculpted, the materials can function metaphorically: “The work that goes into making is part and parcel of the work’s meaning,” says Stockholder.
Part of Herzog’s process is to encrust these materials onto – and into – different surfaces, evoking an entropic process that interacts with new environments. Herzog, who spent a decade as an electrician, explains “while working in the building trades, I became intimately acquainted with the built environment and how it is constructed. On a very personal level I learned about how systems interact and are installed in buildings – what’s behind the walls and under the floors.” Her work can be described as a form of domestic archeology, often engaging architecture and other more intimate forms of material culture.
This exhibition, a look at the past and piecing together of the current moment, probes themes that have fascinated Herzog throughout her career, including sustainability, history, tradition, individualism, sensuality, and public and private. In her hands found and collected textiles form the basis of labor intensive, context-sensitive sculptural installations and discrete pieces; visually dynamic mash-ups, open to multiple readings. As Stockholder says, “Fabrics embody something universal about human beings while they are also imbued with particularity. Herzog’s work asks that we value both. And her agency as an artist resonates with the inventions of all of those who came before her.”
UJA Federation of Greater Toronto, Koffler Arts, CANVAS
Koffler Arts
Youngplace
180 Shaw St., # 104-105