This piece is called Hypnopompia which I began to work on at the end of Feb 2020 and finished in August 2020 for a two person show with artist Jessica Jane Julius called “Between the Edge of Reflection” at Traver Gallery in 2021. It features the characters in my paintings and serves as an environment for them to live in safely in “Reverie Forest” (an ongoing subject in my artwork). I used found objects, blown glass, fabric, and mixed media. The objects I use are ones I have been collecting for decades.

I named the installation after a state I felt like I was living in during Pre-vaccination Covid Winter. I had really spent most of the pandemic leading up to that time feeling pretty safe in my comfortable home and fortunate to be alive and have all of my loved ones just a phone call away. Like a lot of people, I went into the darkness of that Winter and felt inspired to make this new work. Things felt blurry and dark when I began this installation and I started to feel like I was waking up from a dream from the early days of covid. I started to research the state between dreaming and waking up which is called the Hypnopompic State where people can have auditory, visual and sensory touch hallucinations. This resounded with me and therefore after some really beautiful events and some dark events that happened in my personal life at the time, I decided to start looking at that period as a hallucination as a way to move past it.

It began as a place to house the characters in my paintings, then turned into a love letter to someone who woke me up a little bit at the time and opened my heart and then it turned into a place to escape to and find peace.

These "Strange Creatures" are characters who inhabit a forest which serves as a sanctuary for them. All are welcome in this safe zone as they are able to find refuge from societal constraints and can live without fear of judgement as beautiful mutants.

These sculptures are part of a body of work that I began in 2017 when the political climate changed drastically in The United States and I saw many similarities to that of the post- war-era. The work explores the culture of the mid-century and investigates themes of conformity, othering, mass culture, and mass fear. As the government recklessly preyed on people’s hatred of outsiders and their fear of losing their freedoms, it created a society injected with panic.

 I think that the relatability of pop-culture imagery may have instilled a sense of safety and order. I have focused on the phenomenon of kitsch mass-produced products as cultural artifacts and view them as a lens into the cultural landscape. The imagery depicted a sugar-coated idealized version of reality, serving as a distraction from the unvarnished underlying social and political unrest. This dichotomy between the glossy surface of consumer culture and the turbulent realities of society speak to American’s unattainable aspirations at the time. I wanted to alter the objects to change the context of the subjects of these cultural by-products and give them new meaning.

A solo show in September of 2019 at the Heller Gallery in NYC.

“Erica Rosenfeld’s current exhibition, Reverie Forest: Sanctuary for Strange Creatures, focuses on Rosenfeld’s fascination with paint-by-number kits as cultural artifacts and tools of 1950s conformity and includes Strange Creature painting-collages, original wallpaper designs based on altered, painted and collaged kits, as well as Cake Tower light sculptures inspired by them.

The Reverie Forest is represented in the exhibition as discreet vignettes curated directly from Rosenfeld’s studio: an environment rich with thousands of objects, collected as a material diary of her life and ordered into a cacophonous safe-haven, filled with mementoes from her own network of friends and family.”- Heller Gallery

These are painted collages from Paint by Numbers imagery. I pull from 2-25 paintings to create each piece.

Paint by Numbers was invented at a time in America when there was a political system that couldn’t tolerate opposition. Much like today, the government recklessly preyed on people’s hatred for outsiders and people’s fear of losing their free. I see these paintings as a window into the culture of the early 1950’s as they talk about mindless conformity, mass culture and mechanical performance. They also describe the sense of uniformity and conformity that permeated America and its social norms at the time. The paintings “painted a picture” of idealized life that was unattainable by many people at the time. The imagery included dream vacation scenes, European Art, lovable animals and a sugar-coated reality.

I wanted to create a new context for the subjects of these paintings by transforming adorable animals into beautiful mutants and the pastoral landscapes backdrops into peculiar habitats. Their perceived freakishness no longer exists as they have found a safe zone.

Jessica Julius & Erica Rosenfeld: Between The Edge of Reflection

A two person show in August 2021

“Traver Gallery is excited to welcome Erica Rosenfeld and Jessica Julius to Traver Gallery with their joint exhibition, Between the Edge of Reflection.

In this dynamic exhibition, Erica and Jessica transform the physical gallery space with their immersive installations. Consisting of tiny clusters of laced glass orbs, crystals, cut paper, paintings, and foraged relics, their conceptually potent and visually eccentric sculptures are thoughtfully assembled into unusual groups, creating microcosms and otherworldly spaces for us to explore. Through their interwoven intricate networks of words and symbols, Erica and Jessica explore themes of complex human relationships, the order in disorder, and finding beauty in the most absurd or unusual places.

Having first met at an artist residency in 2000, Erica and Jessica have a long-established relationship of sisterhood, friendship, and artistic collaboration. They are founding members of The Burnt Asphalt Family, an artist collective creating community-centric performance art and experiences. These performances are a hybrid of dinner parties, happenings, and interactive installations performed throughout the United States at various Museums and Universities. Between the Edge of Reflection is their first two-person collaborative exhibition.”

In 2013 I began working on an ongoing installation called “Like Remembering a Dream the Day After…” which I am still working on today. My starting point is a memory of a dream, which morphs over time. It is an evolving installation that grows and takes different forms over time and describes the memory of a dream that becomes more abstract as years go on. Each piece in the installation is an artifact of the experience of the dreamscape.

The title describes the feeling one gets when they wake up from a dream and it still feels very lucid. As the day goes on the memory dissipates and becomes more abstract. I think of memory like this in general- awake or asleep, memory becomes distorted over time. We choose what we remember and this affects how we see things. We also choose what we see and this changes our perspective. There is no arrangement of facts that is purely objective and therefore our memory is stretched to conform to our perception of reality. Each installation becomes a different glimpse of the same dream.

All of these Glass Clouds are part of the “Like Remembering a Dream the Day After…” series and are artifacts of the dreamscape experience. Each piece is made from 1000’s of glass shards that I have blown, carved and adhered to a mixed media structure. The mirrored clouds are meant to distort whatever is surrounding the piece much in the way that memory can become abstracted over time. They range in size from 12” - 60” in length.

A Forest describes many dualities in life. It can be a place of danger and asylum, wild and calm, eerie and familiar, earthly and spiritual, deadly and beautiful simultaneously. All of these dichotomies create an unknown magical environment which can lead the its inhabitants into transformative places. I have used the forest as a realm for “Strange Creatures” or beautiful mutants to live in safely without fear of judgement or societal constrictions.

The vignettes in this shrine describe the “Reverie Forest” and the characters in my Strange Creature Portarits that inhabit it. Many of the objects come from collections that I have been amassing and cataloging for years.

From 2007-2019 I created an ongoing installation in a room in my home. The space turned into a large-scale shrine made up of 1000’s of found objects. Some of the objects ended up in my “Reverie Forest Shrine” and all of them served as inspiration for it. I thought of this room as my “Eden”. It served as a sanctuary and served as a means to preserve perceived memory.

The Burnt Asphalt Family is an artist collective co-founded in 2007 by Jessica Jane Julius, Erica Rosenfeld, Emma Salamon, Sam Geer and Skitch Manion after leaving a residency at Wheaton Arts in Millville, NJ. They have since grown to over 30 family members and have hosted events at various institutions including Wheaton Arts, Urban Glass, The Studio at The Corning Museum of Glass, Pittsburgh Glass Center, The Studio at The Chrysler Museum, Pilchuck Glass School, The Bay Area Glass Institute and The University of Louisville. Jessica Jane Julius, Erica Rosenfeld and Emma Salamon curate, facilitate and organize the group. They are made up of artists, designers, fabricators, chefs and educators that have been brought together by a common interest in glass and community. Their work celebrates the cultural histories of glass making, food making and crafting. Through hosting events using glass and food as their primary media, they strive to make participatory artwork that becomes a hybrid of performance art, an installation, a dinner party and a happening. Past events have focused on community in order to breakdown the barrier between the maker/entertainer and the viewer. They try to raise awareness of the various properties of glass as well as new applications of traditional glass techniques. The group seeks to allow people to question their own ideas of craft, entertainment, social values and consumerism.

The Burnt Asphalt Family is an artist collective co-founded in 2007 by Jessica Jane Julius, Erica Rosenfeld, Emma Salamon, Sam Geer and Skitch Manion after leaving a residency at Wheaton Arts in Millville, NJ. They have since grown to over 30 family members and have hosted events at various institutions including Wheaton Arts, Urban Glass, The Studio at The Corning Museum of Glass, Pittsburgh Glass Center, The Studio at The Chrysler Museum, Pilchuck Glass School, The Bay Area Glass Institute and The University of Louisville. Jessica Jane Julius, Erica Rosenfeld and Emma Salamon curate, facilitate and organize the group. They are made up of artists, designers, fabricators, chefs and educators that have been brought together by a common interest in glass and community. Their work celebrates the cultural histories of glass making, food making and crafting. Through hosting events using glass and food as their primary media, they strive to make participatory artwork that becomes a hybrid of performance art, an installation, a dinner party and a happening. Past events have focused on community in order to breakdown the barrier between the maker/entertainer and the viewer. They try to raise awareness of the various properties of glass as well as new applications of traditional glass techniques. The group seeks to allow people to question their own ideas of craft, entertainment, social values and consumerism.

All of these Eggshell Sculptures are part of the “Like Remembering a Dream the Day After…” series and are artifacts of the dreamscape experience. The pieces are made from real eggshells, neon, blown and found glass and mixed media.

Re-Formation was a show that I curated in Fall of 2021 at the Heller Gallery.

As an artist and designer and someone who has been making jewelry since childhood, I have always thought about how jewelry can talk about history, tradition, desire, memory, material associations, culture, class, ritual, art, craft, design and connections between humans. In bringing this diverse group of artists together, my hope is that the dialogue between their work will convey some of these ideas.

Re-formation is a wearable art show where I have asked mixed media and multidisciplinary artists who work in sculpture, installation, performance and/ or functional design to reimagine their artwork into jewelry. The exhibition will be comprised of work from artists who normally work with glass, ceramics, plastics, found objects and video. Most of these makers have never made jewelry or focus on their art and jewelry design practices simultaneously.

The artists explore themes such as mass fear, sensor control, rebirth, cultural heritage, fantasy, and create dialogues in their work that talk about our country's political climate, American history, technology, collective consciousness, the psychology of fear and gender politics. All of these artists meet somewhere at the crossroads of art, craft and design and their work for the exhibition might seem to blur the lines between fine art and decorative art.

I created a series of Glass Tapestries from 2007-2011 when I began to see my jewelry as models for these larger scale pieces. I was interested in making glass into something that is soft and tactile as I find that shiny glass can sometimes repel the viewer. People have told me that they remind them of armor which was not my intension but I think they served as that for me at the time I was making them. They are made from 1000’s of pieces of glass murrini (patterned cane) that I hot-worked, carved and sewed together.

Throughout my life I have been a collector and a hoarder.  I am constantly reorganizing and cataloging my collections and creating shrines with the objects that I find. I think that this is a part of my artistic process and inspires the materials I use. Being surrounded by these objects keeps me surrounded by my art both physically and emotionally.

From 2007-2019 I created an ongoing installation in a room in my home. The space turned into a large-scale shrine made up of 1000’s of found objects. Some of the objects ended up in my work and all of them served as inspiration. I have been making shrines since chidhood and being surrounded by my shrines keeps me surrounded by my art both physically and emotionally. I thought of this room as my “Eden”. It served as a sanctuary and served as a means to preserve perceived memory. It enmeshed different artistic disciplines in a memory-based, magical realism scaffolded by nostalgia.

I am drawn to the idea of the forest in that it can describe many dualities in life. It can be a place of danger and asylum, wild and calm and beautiful and eerie simultaneously. All of these dichotomies create an unknown magical environment which can lead it's inhabitants into transformative places in their lives. These capsules describe a memory of a dream and each one is a glimpse into it. The dream takes place in a forest that is a sanctuary for strange creatures.

I worked in this series about groups from 2009-2011. I collected images of sorority girls, Facebook profiles, men on Match.com that I wasn’t interested in and other self-proclaimed groups as well as groups that society labels us a part of. I was thinking about how as families and communities we create a shared folklore to memorialize people places and events and how as individuals this gives us comfort. I was interested in how people try to find and define their identity.