COMPRESSION: Elana Herzog & Luanne Martineau

July 13 to August 18, 2018
Western Exhibitions, Chicago, Illinois, USA
Curated by Shannon Stratton

COMPRESSION brings the work of Elana Herzog and Luanne Martineau into dialog; both artists whose methodology is that of compression – blending and merging material into surfaces and forms that encode matter and image into enmeshed objects. Compression reduces volume: entangling and constraining material into condensed amalgams of form. Curated by Shannon Stratton, the Mildred and William Lasdon Chief Curator at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, COMPRESSION opens on Friday, July 13 with a free public reception from 5 to 8pm and will run through August 18.

Based in New York, Elana Herzog works predominantly with found textiles, paper pulp, and other cultural detritus, dematerializing and fragmenting forms and images, ultimately leading to a scrambling of representation. Her papermaking incorporates a variety of found materials to build surfaces that waver from dense to deteriorating. The ension in her work between constructed strength and threadbare fragility summons a kind of psychological analog, where the layering and compression of experience and knowing over time is both the foundation and the unmaking of he self.

Montreal-based Luanne Martineau works in paper weaving, collage and needle-felting to produce compressed objects that literally embody her subject matter. Martineau’s practice has long satirized modernist ideals – in terms of material, form and taste – taking up instead, objects that embrace distortion and mess as a means to challenge Western cultural archetypes of the “good.” Martineau’s entangled objects reject the well-behaved, instead encoding the body, sexuality, illness, raunchiness and impropriety into her felted and woven forms.

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Image Credit:
Installation View COMPRESSION: Elana Herzog & Luanne Martineau
Photo Courtesy: James Prinz Photography