Erica Rosenfeld “Reverie Forest: Sanctuary For Strange Creatures”
Heller Gallery
[Image: Erica Rosenfeld "ZEBRA-CHEETAH" acrylic on canvas/mixed media, 12 ¾ x 18 ¼ x 3 in.]
This event has ended.
Reverie Forest: Sanctuary for Strange Creatures, our second solo exhibition of new work by Brooklyn-based artist and designer Erica Rosenfeld, includes forty Strange Creature painting-collages, two large original wallpaper designs based on altered, painted and collaged kits, as well as eight Cake Tower light sculptures inspired by them.
Paint-by-number kits as cultural artifacts and tools of 1950s conformity are the central theme and inspiration in the Reverie Forest: Sanctuary for Strange Creatures show. Rosenfeld has a longstanding fascination with the kits as a window into a period in US history when McCarthyism and blacklisting led to a fear of being accused of being disloyal and encouraged a mindless patriotic conformity. In her re-working of the paint-by-numbers, Rosenfeld transforms pastoral landscapes into peculiar habitats and adorable animals into unknown species, misfits and freaks and simultaneously provides them with the Reverie Forest, her imagined sanctuary. The Reverie Forest is represented in the exhibition as discreet vignettes curated directly from Rosenfeld’s studio: an environment rich with thousands of objects, collected as a material diary of her life and ordered into a cacophonous safe-haven, filled with mementoes from her network of friends and family.
Erica Rosenfeld’s work will be featured in 2020 at the Grand Rapids Art Museum in Grand Rapids, MI, as part of the touring exhibition A New State of Matter: Contemporary Glass. Rosenfeld’s work is held in private and public collections nationally and has been featured in exhibitions at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY, Kentucky Museum of Art, Louisville, KY, Boise Art Museum, Boise, ID, Racine Art Museum, Racine, WI, Museum of American Glass, Millville, NJ and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI.
Media
Schedule
from September 12, 2019 to October 19, 2019
Opening Reception on 2019-09-12 from 18:00 to 20:00