The Development Gallery

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Jennifer Elster

Take Heed

Elster infuses her creative energy and deep angst into this cinematic, multi-medium art exhibition TAKE HEED.

"Pitch dark clarity. Painfully timely show."

--Anthony Haden Guest, Whitehot Magazine Read

"Multi-dimensional bliss..."

"One feels as if they're stepping outside for the first time after an apocalyptic event"

--Benjamin Schmidt, The Knockturnal Read

A journey through the apocalyptic predictions of an anxious artist with a sparkling creepiness. Evoking urgent themes, eerie prescience, and strokes of mania, the artist probes our current times with a critical analysis, offering new insight. Amid the jungle of construction lights illuminating the artwork, and in what feels like a surreal, cinematic experience, the exhibition speaks to our complex times with directness. The exhibit encapsulates both rage and dark humor and fights injustice, while the dates of the artworks document the foresight. Paintings that beckon and warn. Art pieces that one must puzzle together to figure. Portraits provoking surreal realizations and desperate fear. 

Welcome to The Development Gallery celebrating the multi medium exhibition Take Heed, and its newly available limited editions: available here. 

The Artist Statement

A sinking despair. It is with the force of wisdom and a relentless, dissecting of what is, that I bring forth Take Heed. Mounted on experience and sharp and proven, reliable intuition, I beckon the patron to pay attention…but only if they could see! Yet I hope on, like the chances a child gives a parent who constantly disappoints. “They will”, I say to myself, but not aloud, and still unsure. A wicked lashing out to an asleep and/or deadened audience,
or all love to those who know true concern. And now War and Climate Disaster and Pandemics do an interwoven dance in the  intake of our global, daily lives. But will we respond? It is with no assistance to our world crisis that the global majority have a stubborn resistance to the truth. I think it’s good to not be callous during these times, which are only worsening. Instead we need to come together, with compassion for one another,to try and help resolve some of the pressing, critical issues of our time. The urgency of now.
Take Heed.

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Installation Views

Featured Artworks

“Artist Jennifer Elster Revolutionizes Mixed Media to a New Platform”

—Agata Drogowska, Style Lujo Read

" Serrated rage."

--Tyler Nesler, Interlocutor Magazine Read

David Bowie Installation

And with comedy and horror, pathos and style, she weaves in momentos from her earlier life and career, including an installation and artifacts from her avant garde styling work with David Bowie and photographer John Scarisbrick. The installation has been described as “multi dimensional bliss” and ‘serrated rage”.

In a corner, a large-scale homage to David Bowie. Elster presents an installation piece that incorporates her styling work in a photo shoot on Bowie from 1995 for his 1. Outside album. The artist expanded on this work numerous times, including in 2020 for the 25th anniversary of the shoot’s execution, where she painted on the same print in recurring black paint, applied with considered recklessness. In a “tribute to the awesomeness of the whole situation,” Elster here has the cutout piece and bullet belt that was used in the original shoot, and then she built Bowie’s grinning, lipsticked, Codpieced, androgynous photographic specter into a cut web. “I met Bowie as I was referred by the Swedish photographer John Scarisbrick who took the original photograph for 1. Outside,” Elster recalls. “Bowie and I went very deep. I wanted to pay tribute and incorporate but not overwhelm the show. I do like to have my remnants around. I had to go into my hoard to find them.”

“Take a deep dive into the mind of one of New York’s most intriguing underground artists. People have been enthralled by both the exhibition and the David Bowie installation. With artifacts from the character of Ramona on display including the original Serrated Piece he wore and the Bullet Belt.”

—David Bowie News Read full article here

“The experience of the exhibition is its own very unique experience” says the artist.

Elster infuses her creative energy and deep angst into this cinematic, multi-medium art exhibition that takes over the 4,000-square-foot Tribeca space. After entering through towering burgundy curtains, the viewer begins a strange journey. Everything is part of the show.

ABOUT:

The Development Gallery is curated by artist Jennifer Elster. Bringing back the old-school art vibe with an ahead-of-its-time vision, the gallery is lauded for its multi-media exhibitions; dynamic performance artwork, talented musicianship, and special guests which have run the gamut from the underground to public icons. The gallery occupies the ground floor at 75 Leonard Street in a historic Cast-Iron building located in Tribeca with Corinthian columns that run down the center of the space.

The focus for exhibitions will be to debut New York City artists that the public is not aware of and would not otherwise have access to.

Past exhibitions include Jennifer Elster’s The Retrospective of an Extroverted Recluse, the J. Elster Pop Up, The Window Exhibition including Elster’s multi-discipline artworks, a 9/11 memorial tribute, a special commemoration of Elster’s work with the late David Bowie, and a tribute to Mick Rock and Steve Hiett’s life in photography from Elster’s private art collection.

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Former Solo Exhibitions include: