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. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm. Please contact info@westernexhibitions.com for images and more information.

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 tension 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 the self.

Herzog has had solo exhibitions at the Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates; the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Connecticut; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University; The Boiler (Pierogi), Smack Mellon, Lmak Projects, Morgan Lehman Gallery, and PPOW Gallery in New York City; and Diverseworks in Houston, Texas. De-Warped and Un-Weft, a survey of Herzog’s work since 1993, was at the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art in Missouri in 2009. Group shows include the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, New York; the Weatherspoon Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina; The Kohler Museum in Sheboygan, Wisconsin; and at The Brooklyn Museum and The Museum of Arts and Design New York City. Herzog received the Anonymous Was A Woman Award in 2009, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 2007, NYFA Fellowships in 2007 and 1999, the 2004 Lillian Elliot Award, the 2003 Lambent Fund Fellowship and the 1999 Joan Mitchell Award. She is a recipient of a 2017 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.

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.

Martineau’s work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally, with most recent group exhibitions at the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, The Power Plant, The Banff Centre for the Arts, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Recent solo exhibitions include Foreman Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Windsor, Rodman Hall Arts Centre/Brock University, and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. In 2007, Martineau was the recipient of the Shadbolt Foundation’s VIVA Award for the Visual Arts, and in 2009, she represented British Columbia and the Yukon for the Sobey Art Award of Canada.

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Tags: Chicago, COMPRESSION, Elana Herzog, Luanne Martineau, West Town, Western Exhibitions