Elana Herzog: Site-Responsive Installation

A tuft of glittery red fabric catches my eye. It’s tumbling from a corner of the site-specific work in Elana Herzog’s retrospective at Koffler Arts. The rest of Site-Responsive Installation is an assemblage of wallpapers, patterned fabrics and digital prints stapled together, into and around the side of an exposed wall.

A CMYK dotted motif blooms across a layer of paper, like flower-confetti camouflage, interrupted by sheaths of drab wallpaper and by that anomalous shot of red sequins sticking out of a shadowy joint. I see this bolt of dazzle as an emblem of the mischievous streak that runs through Herzog’s fiercely formalist work. It’s anomalous to what she calls her “will to confuse.”...