UnWalled 

An exhibition organized by Corinne Botz at Fahrenheit 451 House in Catskill, NY. Photographer Corinne Botz, poet Brenda Coultas, and installation artist Elana Herzog, display works created in response to Fahrenheit 451 House. The works in UnWalled are installed in conversation with each other and the physical space making a layered visceral experience. Employing a diverse range of media and taking inspiration from Kurt Schwitters’ the Merzbau, these artists all partake in a domestic archeology.

With a continued investment in the issues surrounding space, perception, and the photographic image, Corinne Botz exhibits photographs she captured of Fahrenheit 451 House over the past year. Exhibiting photographs of the space in the space where they were taken, Botz considers notions of interiority, the passing of time, and the slippery nature of perception. Taken with a large-format camera on color film, the images are painterly yet concrete, interacting with the space as sculptural objects. In the form of a photo album and projection, Botz also exhibits images from an ongoing project “Open House” in which she captures images through screenshots of 3D virtual real estate tours. Inspired by her families search for a house in Upstate, New York, this is a growing archive of homes being sold in the area over the past year. These two very different approaches to photographic representation reveal a psychological and visual engagement with interior space amplified by the pandemic.

Brenda Coultas had intended to create a work out of fragments of language; instead, the writing arrived whole. Her project Mortal Beauty, letterpressed on cards, is a fable suggested by conversations within this “unwalled” space that made their way into her imagination. 

Elana Herzog uses material culture to consider aspects of ephemerality, entropy, pleasure and pain. Her focus is on the global migrations of culture and technology as seen through the lens of textiles. Found and collected textiles form the basis of sculptural installations, in which she blends and translates them into visually dynamic mash-ups, open to multiple readings. At Farenheit 451 House Herzog intervenes on the level of decor, responding directly to the wallpaper on the second floor and its state of partial removal and disintegration. She reflects on shifting aesthetic hierarchies, and relationships between taste, class, and cultural aspiration. By introducing textile materials of varied sources, functions and styles, Herzog subsumes the conventional logic of floral patterning into a very different ordering of imagery.