Jennifer Elster "Take Heed"
Multi-medium artist Jennifer Elster's latest exhibition, Take Heed, features raw, image and text-heavy paintings, sculptures, assemblages, and photographs, works both never before seen and others spanning over three decades of intense, highly instinctual, often prophetic artistic creation. On exhibition at The Development Gallery in Tribeca. The exhibition will be up until February 16, 2023. For further info, follow the:
https://www.channelelster.com.
We had the opportunity to ask the artist, Jennifer Elster, a few questions.
How does your upbringing affect your work?
It’s who I am. At a young age, I began creating in all mediums, and I’ve never stopped. I was very sensitive and intuitive, never trained. I was also always on the lookout for evil, and I have carried that astute detection into adulthood. I am worried for us all.
Who are your biggest artistic influences?
My thoughts are a great inspiration to me. And my feelings. The people I love deeply inspire me. Regarding artists, Bob Dylan has been an important influence on me since childhood. My dad played Dylan as a way of communicating with me during hard times. I also had a very powerful moment with Picasso’s Guernica. And the world inspires me.
Could you tell us about me about your favorite artistic medium to work in?
Writing. It's the most accurate. I've written obsessively since a child. I hope I will go out that way too.
Where do you find inspiration?
From within and my life. And I am, of course, triggered by the injustices in the world. I don't look for inspiration per se.
When is your favorite time of day to create?
I love the early morning. Coffee. Floating. Thinking. Then…
Describe how art is important to society?
Art gets to be important to society when the people who have been given the keys for amplification pay attention to what is valuable. I grew up in the NYC art world, where what was best had an easier time getting through. The muck of the art world is a joke. Most art fairs are like design malls. It's depressing. I find a lot of joy in the public spaces in New York that are made for recreational purposes. Central Park and Hudson River Park inspire me. Beautiful! But, I don’t find most "art" (though some) in the current day useful, and I see it being reported about as serious art. Oh well. Important voices are often never heard. Art relieves pain, and when it does its job, it inspires you and opens your mind.
What motivates you to create?
My feelings. I’m an intense person, and it’s my outlet. It’s how I cope and how I have fun.
A journey through the apocalyptic predictions of an artist with a sparkling creepiness. Evoking urgent themes, eerie prescience, and strokes of mania, the artist probes our current times with critical analysis, offering new insight. For Elster, Take Heed makes the connection between fury and mastering one’s own mind. “These kids are splattering Van Goghs, I’m splattering this space with things people should be thinking about and considering. We’re both worried,” she says. “Much of this work is made from sorrow and rage, but I feel calm now. I just want to get things done for our future. I’m a below-the-radar person, but sometimes you have to rise above the radar to do what’s needed.” Take Heed is an expression of concerns over climate change, the war machine, gun violence, mental and physical health.
Amid the jungle of construction lights illuminating the artwork and in what feels like a surreal cinematic experience, the exhibition speaks to our complex times with directness. The exhibit encapsulates both rage and dark humor and fights injustice, while the dates of the artworks document the foresight.
Elster infuses her polymorphic creative energy and deep angst into a cinematic, multi-medium art exhibition that takes over the 4,000-square-foot Tribeca space. After entering through towering burgundy curtains, the viewer begins a strange journey amidst sixteen-foot Corinthian columns through constructions, paintings, and photographs and with apocalyptic predictions infused with the artist’s obstinate dark optimism. Dangling ceiling and ductwork that has gone astray loom in the 19th-century structure that houses the gallery. Everything is part of the show.
Paintings that beckon and warn. Art pieces that one must puzzle together to figure. Portraits provoke surreal realizations and desperate fear. And with comedy and horror, pathos and style, she weaves in mementos from her earlier life and career, including an installation and artifacts from her avant-garde styling work with David Bowie.
The homage to David Bowie: Elster presents an installation piece that incorporates her styling work in a photo shoot on Bowie from 1995 for his 1. Outside album. The artist expanded on this work numerous times, including in 2020 for the 25th anniversary of the shoot’s execution, where she painted on the same print in recurring black paint, applied with considered recklessness. In a “tribute to the awesomeness of the whole situation,” Elster here has the cutout piece and bullet belt that was used in the original shoot, and then she built Bowie’s grinning, lipsticked, Codpieced, androgynous photographic specter into a cut web. “I met Bowie as I was referred by the Swedish photographer John Scarisbrick who took the original photograph,” Elster recalls. “Bowie and I went very deep. I wanted to pay tribute and incorporate but not overwhelm the show. I do like to have my remnants around. I had to go into my hoard to find them.”
The exhibition is like an alternative universe, where awareness of our current world crisis is all around, and yet, perhaps from the relief of kin concerns, an odd serenity abounds.
Jennifer Elster is an artist, writer, filmmaker, photographer, performer, and musician. Her work, in all mediums, uses language and images to pierce the truth in unexpected ways. With a street edge and sophistication, Elster approaches her art with an untrained, raw, and aggressive style all her own, evident in both of her solo art exhibitions, The Retrospective of an Extroverted Recluse and The Wake the F*ck Up Show. In her work, it is as if she is a watchdog for society, worried for us all. She has stood up for many social justice issues over the years, from protecting the vote to writing an online campaign supporting net neutrality with Gloria Steinem. She has released the first songs from her upcoming album of love and experimental songs and performed art at the New Museum, signs and symbols, Catinca Tabacaru, Central Booking, and The Development. In her youth, Elster put herself through college at NYU by styling David Bowie, Chloe Sevigny, Trent Reznor, + others and also worked at Conde Nast — known for her aesthetic and wild imagination. Elster began her work in film. She went on to write, direct, produce and star in the feature film Particles of Truth, which played on Netflix and in New Voices on The Sundance Channel. She created her two upcoming film series, In the Woods (and Elsewhere) and Into the Cave (and The Mad Pacer) –a glimpse into the bizarre landscape of her films began as an online cinematic art experience, ItW Pathway, which featured the late Glenn O’Brien, Jorgen Leth, Will Oldham, and others, with original vocalizations written by Elster and performed by Yoko Ono. Elster was born and raised in New York City, where she continues to live and work.
For further inquiries please contact AtachiAtTheDevelopment@gmail.com
For further press inquiries please contact Mandie Erickson at Mandie@showroomseven.com
Tearsheets by Alexa Dyer, Graphic Design Coordinator, PhotoBook Magazine
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