JENNIFER ELSTER
Jennifer Elster is a native New Yorker, critical thinker, artist, writer, director, filmmaker, photographer, musician, and performer who offers a deep and direct awareness of the human condition and our current world crises. With street edge and sophistication, Elster approaches her art with an untrained, raw, and aggressive style all her own, often using sharp diction, visual art and performances to convey our times and our struggles. Fueled by an upbringing that was strickened by danger, and complexities, she applies her instinctual problem-solving skills and innovative thinking to shed new perspective on pressing issues, evident in her notable exhibitions, including The Retrospective of an Extroverted Recluse, The Wake The F*ck Up Show, Take Heed, and Quite a Bite. Each exhibition interweaved various forms of media, such as photography, video, performance art, and painting, exploring the human experience and issues people don't want to face. Beginning in childhood, her first obsessions were with writing and the workings of the mind, which led her to earn a degree in writing and psychology at NYU while styling icons like David Bowie. She then transitioned into filmmaking, where her directorial short and feature film work garnered recognition and awards at notable film festivals, debuted at Village East, and played on Sundance Channel and Netflix. Her online cinematic excursion, ItW Pathway, was considered an innovation to the medium. Her next film project ...In the Woods (and Elsewhere) features varied unknown and known personalities with vocalizations performed by Yoko Ono. The production has spanned over two decades. Her work has been featured in publications such as The Art Newspaper, Rolling Stone, and New York Magazine, as well as at venues such as New Museum and Grand Central Station, to name a few.
Currently, The Development Gallery is exhibiting The Classics.
Next project:
Over the years Elster had spent years of deep, and, at times, bizarre excavation into the recesses of her mind and the minds of her subjects, analyzing the depths of human nature.
In Elster's directorial film work, she takes an unabashed look, in both documentary and fiction, into the complexities of the psychology of existence, which can be at times hilarious and at others times terrifying. In the upcoming film series (which she has been filming for twenty years) ...IN THE WOODS (and Elsewhere), Into the Cave, and In the Studio, her subjects include Yoko Ono, Terrence Howard, the late Glenn O’Brien, Alan Cumming, Debra Winger, Rufus Wainwright, Aimee Mullins, Will Shortz, Questlove and many others. The films are created and directed by Elster, and are marked by her unusual instructions: the subjects have no idea what they have gotten involved in, what will happen, or if they will ever see the outcome. There have been glimpses into the project over the years, in the form of an interactive online art experience, ITW Pathway Part I, that garnered much press, but the actual series has not been seen by anyone.
Archived Art Biography
Having grown up in the New York City underground art scene, dating back as a performance dance artist in her teens, Elster took note of the disintegrating experimental art, film and music platforms for original voices and decided to launch Channel ELSTER, a place for Out of the Ordinary Art, Cinema and Sound.
Please do visit J. ELSTER, where Elster's raw, sculptural, luxury accessory collection can be found.
