Elizabeth Jaeger

Klemm's is pleased to present Elizabeth Jaeger’s first solo exhibition Brine at the gallery. The artist has joined the gallery program starting this year.

Empty, Rotting, Hollow... Jaeger’s sculpture series presented in an installation in the gallery space, explores the emotive, almost mortal qualities of man-made objects.Her fragile, vase-like glass fish dangle above the floor on dark cold, steel constructions. Their sharp, copper teeth bared, the fish ostensibly grimace in the face of advanced rigidity – one last, desperate gasp for air? The ambiance is conditioned by the show’s title: Brine, a preserving, thermal fluid, but also a hazardous byproduct of industrial processes. The floor is littered with gravel, reminiscent of an abandoned rocky shore, and serves as a site, in an almost archeological sense, hiding broken ceramic molds—fragmented artefacts from the complex production process, remnants of the sculptures’ material genesis.

With a growing sense of unease and uncanniness embedded in the sculptural arrangement, the gallery as a whole becomes a quiet refuge of forsaken paraphernalia. Discarded and disjunct, the brittle glass bodies and their former molds can be taken as metaphors for a sense of fatigue and escapism—hollow remains of a society in silent, unrelenting paralysis.

Elizabeth Jaeger manipulates seemingly familiar relationship between the viewers and their own physicality, their surrounding and their consciousness. The artist discloses a complex story of phenomenological concern, behind the construction of meaning of organic, and synthetic material. Her objects unfold as existentialist thought experiments that question material realities, as embodiments of a critical, political mindset.

Elizabeth Jaeger (born 1988) studied at Lewis and Clark College, Portland, OR and at the École Nationale Supérieur des Arts, Nancy, France. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions were exhibited at Jack Hanley Gallery; at And Now in Dallas, TX and at Eli Ping, New York. The artist has participated in numerous group exhibitions in institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1 and at Sculpture Center, New York.