From accessories worn by Trent Reznor and David Bowie to introspection channeled through graphic art, this New York artist’s latest exhibition in Tribeca’s Development Gallery unearths pieces from her collection to revive her musings from across decades.
The Development Gallery in Tribeca currently features the works of Jennifer Elster, a multi-hyphenate artist native to New York. Her artistry exists within the space of experimentation and social activism — in addition to painting and photography, her portfolio is largely composed of avant-garde films, some of which have screened at the Tribeca Film Festival and Los Angeles Film Festival. Her time as a stylist has also left an indelible mark, and her work has graced the covers of outlets such as Rolling Stone, Dazed, and Time Magazine. A sense of duty and activism permeates through Elster’s work, as well — much of her work serves as a call to action, and a dress Elster designed for Shirley Manson’s “I Think I’m Paranoid” video sold for 31k at an auction hosted by the singer-songwriter to benefit the LA Fires.
Having lived many lives as an artist, filmmaker, designer, and performer, her curated exhibition, “The Classics,” embodies her multiplicities as a creator. Visitors can walk through and engage with several unearthed features from across her career, spread in curated assemblages around the gallery’s open space.
For Elster, a longtime resident of the city, the exhibition being situated in Tribeca was meaningful in itself. Her residence within New York over decades first led her to become invested in the art scene as a young creative, and eventually see the city through its darkest moments. She and her husband lived across from the World Trade Center on 9/11, and bore close witness to the day’s consequences.
When you’re at that close proximity, you really feel like the plane is coming right at you,” Elster said. “It’s a view that I have never even seen recorded. So that had a huge impact on my internal life. And I think when you see some of the things through the show, you’ll see how that kind of manifests.”
Elster spoke about how even ahead of that day, she engaged in speculation around a sense of impending disaster within her artistry. Warfare Corner features self-portraiture and physical arrangements adorned by gas masks and safety suits, conveying feelings of disarray and disaster. These ruminations take the form of a tangible suit strewn across a stretcher, or a large printed portrait of a suited-up Elster taken from an imperious high angle. The assemblage conveys a feeling of speculation and dread, a notion of looking toward the worst that feels timely even in its current revival.
That sense of speculation, as well as the influence of history upon Elster, synthesize together in The Wake the F*ck Up Series. Across several white canvases within the series, Elster implores viewers to “Pay Attention” and “Beware of Reality” explicitly — painting the phrases out in stylized capitalizations and stark black ink. While much of Elster’s work elicits degrees of personal interpretation, these canvas pieces assert timely truths that seem to be better left explicitly said.
As well as looking outwards and backwards into recent history, Elster’s show is equal parts introspective and personal. The Garden of Artifacts subsumes a wall of the gallery and poses a blended archive of Elster’s creations and relics of her childhood, arranged across old furniture and suspended from the ceiling. The visual amalgamation — family photos, musical paraphernalia, and Elster’s own original textile designs sit together across the assemblage — conveys a sense of nostalgia while serving to provide a look into Elster’s creative trajectory. For Elster, curating the display involved going through family archives and personal creative stores, finding resonance in both works of her creation and objects that have been present throughout her life.
What this world does is really put on pedestals the things that are keepsakes, that mean something to people,” Elster said of The Garden of Artifacts. “We all have a garden of artifacts, you know? We all have things that we treasure. Time is moving so fast, so we feel like everything is so transient, in a way, but it’s really kind of awesome when you stop and realize, ‘Oh my God, I love this.’”
The exhibition stands out for how Elster’s designs and ideas shift focus and form over the years, often captured through photography. Yoko Ono’s vocalizations feature on some of Elster’s original written lyrical sequences, which are present in record form within The Garden of Artifacts. A pair of glasses designed by Elster is seen pictured on Redman of the Wu-Tang Clan for the cover of Trace, as well as photographed on Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth for the cover of Paper Magazine. The veins of continuity between Elster’s chosen creative themes and the individuals who amplified them within the exhibition highlight the consistencies in both her creativity and sense of purpose within the city and the surrounding world. The Classics places relics of Elster’s past and her creations in conversation, rendering them inextricably related from all across her career.
The Classics will be on view at Tribeca’s Development Gallery until May 21.
