Jelena Behrend
DESTROY ME
July 19 - July 27, 2011
Reception Tuesday, July 19, 6-8pm
Fitzroy Gallery is pleased to announce DESTROY ME, the first New York solo exhibition of Jelena Behrend. Centered around a working recreation of Behrend’s Lower East Side studio, the exhibition brings together video, assemblages, and photographs, providing insight into the artist’s working methodology.
A series of new assemblages chart a personal collection of found and handmade objects, tracing various time periods, countries, and previous works. As well, like a scrapbook, a slideshow incorporates important items such as family letters and early photographs. A series of eight videos presides—many of them shot from the vantage point of a stationary computer, positioned in a small dark room, observing the activities of inhabitants and visitors. The computer is also the source of shifting soundtracks, a playlist that traverses time and geography as well.
Known as a cutting-edge jeweler, Jelena Behrend was born and raised in Serbia. She learned her craft with old world artisans, and refined her signature style and techniques with influences ranging from ancient Greece to vivid New York City, from candlelit churches to punk rock clubs. Moving to the United States in the late ‘80s, Behrend apprenticed for a master jeweler in Los Angeles and opened her first studio in LA in 1994. By 1996, Behrend headed to New York City, set up a studio, then opened Jelena Behrend Studio in an Orchard Street storefront—a now-iconic destination for Lower East Side veterans. The former shop and its transition into a new studio on Chrystie Street are the subjects of Behrend’s first gallery exhibition—places where Behrend hammers out a creative context in which her alchemical work can be made.
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