The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum announces Elizabeth Englander’s Eminem Buddhism Vol 3
The exhibit runs April 7 – October 20
Elizabeth Englander’s Eminem Buddhism Vol 3
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum • 258 Main St, Ridgefield, CT 06877
April 7 – October 20, 2024
Eminem Buddhism Vol 3
Photo via The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is pleased to announce Elizabeth Englander’s first solo museum
presentation, Eminem Buddhism, Volume 3, on view April 7 to October 20, 2024. 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 2nd century BCE in India. From this iconography certain sacred forms emerge as the
protagonists in her sculptures: Chamunda, “the feminine element of god,” or shakti, whose attributes symbolize
the destruction of ignorance, hatred, fear, and death;2 the poet-saint Karaikkal Ammaiyar who, “traded her
beauty to worship as one of Shiva’s cremation ground ghouls” ;3 Bahubali, the victorious heir of a fratricidal
dynastic war who renounces his inheritance and embraces the ascetic life; Jinas, the “beings who [have]
transcended the flux of the world and attained total equanimity.”4 Sculptural practice led Englander to a spiritual
practice in the form of Zen Buddhism. This new experience informs recent works seated, like the bodhisattva
Avalokiteshvara, in so-called “royal ease,” and in the orthoprax postures of zazen.
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.
Elizabeth Englander
Elizabeth Englander (b. 1988, Boston, MA) lives and works in New York, NY. She received her BFA from The
Rhode Island School of Design in 2011 and her MFA from Hunter College in 2019. Recent solo exhibitions
include: House of Gaga, Guadalajara (2023); Liste Art Fair Basel, solo presentation with Theta (2023); Theta, New
York (2022); Smart Objects, Los Angeles (2021); and From the Desk of Lucy Bull, Los Angeles (2019). Group
exhibitions have been held at: White Columns, New York (2023); Lomex, New York (2022); What Pipeline,
Detroit (2022); Theta, New York (2021); Smart Objects, Los Angeles (2021); Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2021);
Safe Gallery, Brooklyn (2019); and Muzeum Ikon, Warsaw, PL (2018).
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