Elana Herzog, Cross Pollinations 2

While this project began before the Covid-19 pandemic world, I see it as participating in a conversation that is ongoing and relevant to recent events. I began the Cross-Pollinations series during a 2019 residency at Wave Hill, which is an art space, a botanic garden, and the former visions of both nature and culture. There, I responded to the stately interior of the buildings and began several large hanging curtain-like pieces that layer and hybridize floral textiles collected in several parts of the world. After relocating this work-in-progress to my studio, I’ve developed its sculptural characteristics to engage architecture differently, and to challenge its relationship to “curtain.” The residency at Wave Hill followed a month spent in Russia researching the pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post-Soviet textile industry and textile motifs. The 19th-century colonization of Central Asia by Russia took place as it vied for dominance in the cotton trade, competing against a US industry built on slave labor. The vernacular culture that emerged was impacted by these changes–coercive labor practices, the destruction of subsistence economies, and the emergence of new markets. Just as plant motifs are predominant in Russian textiles, they are pervasive throughout most of the world, and show the influence of cultures on one another. Plant life, both cultivated and “wild,” participates in the global migration of cultures and goods–sometimes inadvertently impacting the ecosystem of its new surrounding. Many terms refer both to plants and to people, for instance: uprooted, transplanted, invasive, native, alien. Conquerors often import the gardens of their homelands, planting them as they would plant their national flag. All of this parallels other forms of cultural and economic exchange that take place.