Elana Marte Adler

Space 534 GALLERY

Jun 7, 2024 – Jul 20, 2024

This three-person exhibition brings together works by Elana Marte Adler (Portland, ME), Matt Kayhoe Brett (Richmond, VA), and Jesse Harrod (Philadelphia, PA/New York, NY). Each artist’s material, formal, and process-based exploration of grids, weaves, braids, and interlaced materials is grounded in unique conceptual investigations of the world around them and worlds not visible to us.

Harrod’s work explores embodiment, gender, and sexual identity; increasingly celebrated for their paracord works, a group of brasses cast in residence at the Kohler Art Center from paracords is presented here, courtesy of Fleisher/Ollman Gallery. Elana Adler is a multi-disciplinary artist who uses the grid as a “tactical mapping system”, and a variable visual vocabulary exploring architecture, chaos, and abstract concepts about space and time. Matt Brett’s work evokes themes including computational media, digital visualization, and networks in various sculptural works cast or created from found materials, as well as cyanotypes and other media.

images: Joel Tsui @artarhcival

https://space538.org/exhibition/off-grid/

Review written by Jorge S. Arango, Portland Press Herald, July 14, 2024

https://web.archive.org/web/20240716045417/https://www.pressherald.com/2024/07/14/space-and-speedwell/

To Through, a solo show at Buoy Gallery in Kittery, ME. 2023

Exhibition notes by Anna F. Queen

Photography by Dylan Hausthor

Elana Adler’s exhibition, To Through, brings together works that function through materiality in an interstitial space where we are confronted with what is in between. The objects are seemingly enigmatic, tools without buttons or signs without words. Adler puts material to this usually forgotten space past boundaries where our vantage point usually stops. Through emphasis on what is normally forgotten we are caught off guard in the best way before the work brings us back to resolve.

In her practice, Adler creates an ongoing narrative of dynamic objects, documenting their existence through reusing and building upon previous works. Static and mobile, these works heighten our observation of basic material properties to a full and enticing range of gestures and emotions.

When static, Inhalation hangs limp, the keel keeping parallel to the floor like a boat in calm seas. With the introduction of a breeze it begins a shallow breath, the tubes filling and flowing as air passes through. It acts as an organ of the building, documenting what we knew already was present, but could only feel before, like a poetic challenge.

Its counterpart, Exhalation, resides on the brick exterior, getting life force from a venting fan. As air pushes out from the interior of the building the tube inflates and swells, acting as a new appendage. Created from the cut material of its partner piece inside, it is a remnant of the initial work. This duo acts as a record, documenting both natural and made systems that reflect back our own body's necessities. We create a rhythm of breath while we watch these pieces move, flowing back at us in reciprocating motion.

Seemingly rising up out of the floor, Heavy Sigh sits in concrete, weighted and firm on the ground while the same piece in rubber, Giggle, bubbles up. The rubber casts seep from the wall down the floor, bridging the gap of the ubiquitous 90° angle. These works share the same proportion of circle to surrounding space as Inhalation, mirroring the pattern through completely different forms. These casts of the same form exemplify their distinct materials opposite expressions, functioning as connected dichotomies.

Hung on the walls are textile works drawn with ink and embroidered over the surface. Titled, Shadow of Invisible Barriers, the drawings map shadows of an earlier hanging sculpture, translating the previously ephemeral into a physical fingerprint. This continued workflow through various bodies of work creates a lineage that’s constantly reinforcing Adler’s material vernacular, a push and pull from fleeting into the physical and back again through time.

Spiring acts as a static measurement of wind or air movement, a nod to a tool or record. However, Adler has created the measurement herself through laboriously knitting wire tubes, a repetition of a three dimensional drawing creating form over time. These static limbs suspended mid blow, acting as archaeological casts of previous airflow through a flowing tube. The scale and static nature of these forms makes them feel monumental.

Adler has created a liminal space in this exhibition through rhythm and repetition of material, form, and color. There is a firm balance of presenting us with dichotomies to dissect as well as knowing where to create pause. It heightens recognizable materials to a place of contemplation, allowing them to function with their inherent qualities and constraints. The works in To Through emote their characteristics towards us in both functional disruption and enticement.

Multi layer network inspired by mycelium and periwinkle.

Cotton, 24” x 48” x 24”, 2022.

I see through your barriers (2021) by Elana Adler is inspired by Jewish material concepts of community building. The partially see-through sculpture which takes the form of a dripping grid is based on a personalized unit of measure the artist designed while echoing "handbreadth," a traditional measuring unit used to build the Sukkah (a temporary shelter constructed for the holiday of Sukkot). Hovering off the ground, the sculpture also considers the space of the Eruv (an urban area enclosed by a wire boundary, permitting various activities on the Sabbath). Used in reversal, here the concept produces spatial exclusion: an impenetrable space that one can see but not enter. 

This work is included in the exhibition Regarding The Missing Objects at Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, IL.

The absent exhibition—a thesis exhibition for the Chicago Jewish Artists Fellowship at the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership—was originally planned to happen there in June 2019. Two months prior to the exhibition’s opening, the host institution decided against exhibiting one of the participating artist’s works, stating the work featured a “one-sided” view of Gaza after the 2014 Israeli aerial raids. The decision led to the fellows-artists unanimously withdrawing from the exhibition and to the subsequent resignation of Lichtzier, who at the time was the Director of the Fellowship. Prior to the thesis exhibition’s cancellation, the artists intended to present selected items from the institution’s collection upon which they conducted a year-long artistic investigation while developing their own work.

Built on the mostly hidden dynamics between institutions that care for cultural archives, and the artists and scholars who study them, Regarding the Missing Objects endeavors in excavating objects and histories that were denied representation. The exhibition invites us to ask what are the material and immaterial outcomes of institutional censorship? What historical perspectives are being suppressed in museum collections and why? In turn, the artworks here suggest how collections and archives that resist institutional silencing may take shape in the future.

Translation of a network in motioned captured in shadow.

Ink and embroidery on linen. 2021- 2022

Planning the Site was a two person exhibition with myself, Elana Adler, and Austen Brown. It was shown through the Sistered Collective at New Systems Exhibitions in Portland, Maine.

The exhibition interrogates and then subverts the rigid politics of early modernism; where Austen Brown establishes the urban form as a history of power, Elana Adler deflates it. Planning the Site consists of Adler’s 100+ open cubes made of rubber to which Adler arranged on the floor responding to the architecture of the space, alongside vinyl directions adhered to the wall, also referencing the architecture, providing prompts for visitors to re-arrange the rubber sculptures. Brown’s contribution was a two-channel audio piece and 18 embossed aluminum panels of architectural plans. In addition, there was a short essay written by Brown, which was printed and made available as a take away.

This program was partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council.

Inspired by Robert Rohm who made a series of instruction based installations using instruction and manila rope.

I have been recreating my own versions of these installations. The images are documentation of the performative process.

Using open rubber cubes to perform and contradict structures of power. Borrowing the grid initiated by early modernist architects and artists, these cubes rest on a floppy foundation, and their translucent outlines frame the interior while organizing the exterior. The units generate order in their placement and historical reading, while the material properties of rubber subvert their structural rigidity and marker of authority.

Alongside the sculptural objects are instructional cards that invite audience participation. The combination of symbols and open ended prompts requests engagement while maintaining the individuals autonomy. Through physical experimentation the audience is asked to negotiate, destabilize, and play with how the cubes interact with each other as potential building blocks.

Schematics describes the outer limits of a shape, the mortar outlines of a brick wall without bricks, yet they are formed by being cast within a system, a floppy exo- skeleton, bringing attention to the space they frame.  This is the beginning of a conversation about modular mapping, interiority/exteriority, precarious strength, and fluidity of structure.

By unraveling the grid to understand how coordinates intersecting on a map can result in a picture or place—which then becomes a pixel of a grander image—Disentangle is an attempt to visualize schematics, the fluidity of mapping, and the perception of location.

felt and thread

Legibility of a system through control and chaos.

Colors have a strange duplicity and a kind of dual hermaphroditism. A peculiar way of attracting, associating, mixing, neutralizing, canceling one another.

circuit, sound, and steel

Two eight-step sequencers omit the intrinsic chirps of 16 different speakers on opposite sides of a space, each playing at different speeds. Throughout the space, the beats overlap, the tempo of one rising to the foreground or falling to the background depending on ones positioning. Does the sound of this work omit a cacophonous jumble, or does it reverberate a rhythmic breath? How much information is necessary to comprehend a system? Like the hum and grid of a city, experience with these works reveals both chaos and organization.

They are confusingly aware with a maddening, indefinable sense of emptiness

Their bodies are deprived of their reality of breath, of voice, of the sound you make in moving about

To become a dumb image which quivers for a moment and disappears in silence

A pixel of a landscape. A window to a place. Experiments with sound, sight, and site. To be seen along with audio tapes: Sounds of the Sunrise.

Ink and embroidery on linen.

Meditation on driving, motion, space, and time.

2017

Steel, graphite, vinyl, and shadow

Iterative work entangling ideas of collapsed perception of space, inspired by Paul Virilio's text Open Sky. Thinking about shadow as evidence of idea, as well as the physical manifestation of a belief system or network of understanding. I am attempting to acknowledge that objects are not as concrete as we see them. Shadow allows the invisible to be visible, to complicate, and to inform. This is an honest interpretation of material: raw steel, shadow, and graphite drawing to depict different levels of human involvement. There is a range of affectedness.

Using the grid as an entry point, this is a transformation and translation of idea through materials and technology.

photography by: Cassandra Davis

2017

Rope, paint, eye-hooks, plywood.

Iterative works inspired about Paul Virilio's text Open Sky. 

I'm thinking about the life span of a piece, a sculpture or installation that is used in a performance and video documentation that leaves the residue of an object that is then another piece. 

I have been interested in exploring the intersection between the material and the nonmaterial, the physical and the virtual, real-time and virtual-time, and the actual and the technological. By capturing the collapse of physical space through time, I highlight that moment of intersection.  I am using the metaphor of the collapsing of physical space to represent the flattening of our perception of our environment due to our increasingly immediate digital world. 

Our instantaneous and immediate understanding of digital time has caused a change in our interaction with the physical world. I am hoping to maintain an emphasis on tangible experiences in the material world while interpreting abstract concepts of space and time. It is important to define time or what lies under the umbrella of the notion of time. The idea of ‘real time’ includes the speed of time, light, and reality of virtual immediacy. By virtual immediacy, I mean the duration of the transmission of messages; how quickly information can be sent and received, no matter the physical distance between places. This makes me curious about the duration of event and the duration of communication. Is the duration of the event what is critical? Or is what is important how that event then affects its environment on a micro and macro scale? Is it the event that is important or the result?

For this video, I turned my studio into a green screen, and I have created a three dimensional net grid that is anchored to the floor and ceiling.  The X, Y, and Z axes are physically articulated in rope form. I am using the tension of the rope to depict time, the fourth dimension. The inflated volume of the net cube in space equates a four dimensional experience (space and time). 

The tension of the grid in space is slowly removed. The anchor points are cut in even intervals. I literally walk around the object in space and cut through the tautness. The physical grid slowly gets freed and then collapses. The reaction of the object to being cut becomes more extreme through its duration. The matrix buzzes, vibrates, sways, flings, falls, and collapses. 

The green screen is a representation of a virtual, imagined space.

I have been utilizing the grid as a universal icon within art and as an entry point for thinking about surveying space. It signifies mapping and coordinates very literally with the X, Y, and Z axes. It is utilized in technological mapping and virtual programing software, city planning, systems and collapsing synapses of the brain, as well as how people see and experience the world through technology, monitors, and photography.

Through this video, I am trying to articulate the flattened perception of our reality due to technological immediacy and how we now perceive time. Cutting the tension (the fourth dimension), results in the physical collapse of this object. This physically actualizes the flattening of perception into a two-dimensional screen, monitor, or virtual space. Once something is created and completed, we no longer read the making process within it. The labor and process of creation are lost. 

The more I think about this and our technological climate, I recognize the importance in presenting the physical alongside the virtual. It is valuable to focus on making work that is a result of their point of intersection.

I have been thinking about what marks the event and how to understand an event during and after it happens. How does one begin to signify change as it is happening? I have always been fascinated with ideas of Op Art and the gestalt. It relates to the interest in pattern and how patterns take form and evolve. In the case of this video, the eyes use the understanding of density and the change in density in the grid to understand a physical representation, the fourth dimension, and physical space. Thus, a change in density or shape is how one visually understands the collapse or material change. It is how you can read the interaction. I realize the gestalt is phenomenological; it is the study of that which appears and is experienced.

2017

Sound and translation experiments with Abby Santourian. Video and sound clips from the Affirmation Translation Project.

There is a 10 Step sequencer with 10 separate amps and a photo sensor- tremolo attached to the tape deck. The speed of the blinking LED is controlling the speed of the audio. There is a potentiometer that allows one to alter the LED speed of the sequencer. There is also an additional tape deck that is recording and replaying in real time.

2016

Cast bronze and iron.

Full cubes measure 9" x 9" x 9."

Inspired by Paul Virilio's Open Sky, these works are made using lost wax ceramic shell and material burn out methods.

Here, material strength is tested; hot tears are apparent within the iron casts. The leaks and fragility within the bronze become solidified.

2015-16.

Bronze, concrete, and cotton.

An exploration of material and technological hierarchies.

2016

Bronze, gold leaf, steel.

These works consider how different types of values and technologies are altered through physical material transformations. 

This work was made by creating a 1200 lb. sand mold. Included are in-process images to depict scale.

2015-2016

Double Ikat handwoven fabric, LED lightboxes, LED lights, and video.

The title, Exact Color of Doubt, comes from the song by the band, the Liars. In considering the title, I've generated iterative works that culminate in video, fabric, and light.

The slow process of weaving, the additive nature of generating a work is being likened to the formation of a memory piece by piece; each intersection of thread equates a pixel. I am contemplating the attention span and the meditative quality of watching TV, alongside the subjectivity of color and emotion. 

Collaborative work with Nick Davis, 2016

A real time sound and light performance depicting the interaction and manipulation of a physical net grid. It seeks to give sound to the communication between multiple dimensions.

2016

Double ikat handwoven fabric, LED light boxes, ink on mylar.

An exploration shown alongside the work, Exact Color Of Doubt.

“I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory and a slippery hold." -Vladimir Nobokov, Speak, Memory

I explore color as emotional transference and material as physical transference. I consider how light alters perception through materialization and dematerialization, as well as the elevation and deterioration of objects from one material to the next. 

2016

Studio material studies. Inkjet prints, steel, cotton, LED.

I consider:

Grid as an entry point.

Grid as an organizational tool for seeing.

The border between chaos and understanding -- tension or framing? 

Glitch in a system.

2016

Hand-dyed, hand woven Ikat fabric.

These are attempts to generate the fade, light, glitch, and static of analog film within weaving.

2016

video

2014

Video stills.

An exploration of liminality.

2016

Fabric imprints in bronze.

2016

Bronze and concrete. 

I'm interested in capturing what gets lost and altered through memory, translation, or transformation. 

2015

Concrete, gold leaf, ash from written correspondence. 

In collaboration with Steve Clorfeine.

Titles of each urn, taken from excerpts of letters:

1. Aside from that, I maneuver.

2. Huge chunks of strain on an already shaky relationship.

3. I am less and less anxious when my lazy mind appears.

4. Is it possible to smile without a face?

5. But it dimmed and faded and kindled and so forth since then.

6. Do you remember when the kettle was boiling with no whistle? Well, the whistle had fallen inside.

7. I was living another side of life.

2010-2014

Framed cross-stitch and embroidery on cotton and linen. 

This series of forty-plus samplers is intended to be provocative and evoke emotion. It is a contemporary feminist interpretation of women’s work and an objectification of my personal experience. Each captures a moment, giving these words a visual presence, a power, and a state of concreteness. These words were hurled casually and heard quickly but required hours of time-consuming, careful stitching.

The physically delicate, traditionally feminine, form of the piece engages viewers and asks them to confront a false sense of sweetness that may mask its true crassness and vulgarity.

You read one sampler. Perhaps you are amused, but as you continue reading and consider the body as an entire collection, the response changes. The inherent vulgarity emerges. It is a beautification of an assault. Perhaps these statements are meant to compliment, but most are highly sexualized statements whispered or screamed by a random stranger. They were abrasive and an invasion of my personal space.

Inspired by what is traditionally seen as women's craft, I looked to samplers. Samplers are a decorative piece of needlework, often included in a hope chest that shows the proficiency of decorative stitching and the knowledge of Biblical stories, imagery, the alphabet, and numbers. The hope chest represents the wealth, skills, and ability to be a good wife. A woman was reduced to such craft.

Drawing from this history of hope chests and samplers, this body of samplers is a contemporary and unexpected response to
unsolicited and unwanted attention. They reduce the complex emotional experience of being heckled by catcalls to a simple piece of women’s work.

2010

9 plywood boxes measuring 8" x 8" x 4" and yarn.

An exploration of ideas between art and craft. and inspired by the artistry of Mennonite quilts. 

2014-2015

Embroidery on cotton/linen. 

A meditation of an additive traveling thread and the creation of dimensionality through the confusion of spaces and planes.