DISCARDED WOODEN TCHOTCHKES BECOME WORKS OF ART

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, will present Elizabeth Englander’s first solo museum exhibit, “Eminem Buddhism, Volume 3,” from April 7 to Oct. 20. The exhibition will be accompanied by the artist’s first museum publication.

Nutcrackers, toys, outgrown children’s furniture, and other discarded wooden tchotchkes are the material basis of Englander’s sculptures of gods, goddesses and saints from the pantheons of Jainism, Hinduism and Buddhism. Taking artifacts from consumer culture —paradoxically loaded with memory and nostalgia, but endemically disposable — she reassigns the fragments new anatomical significance and joins them into abstracted bodies that capture identifying attributes of the deities they represent. Englander writes: “I like to imagine that by dismembering them, I free them from some of this karma. Refashioned into spacious, divine bodies, the resulting personal icons are indices of my dialogue with the dharma.”

The iconography is drawn from Englander’s study of Asian religious art, specifically the history of statuary icons that began in the second century BCE in India. From this iconography certain sacred forms emerge as the protagonists in her sculptures.

The title of the exhibition series is taken from stories written by the artist’s brother when they were children that chronicles the spiritual conversion of the rapper Eminem under the guidance of Buddha.

The artist’s first museum publication will accompany the exhibition, featuring an essay by the curator, Eduardo Andres Alfonso, Associate Curator.

Englander lives and works in New York City. She received her BFA from The Rhode Island School of Design in 2011 and her MFA from Hunter College in 2019.