Industrial Secretions
Group Exhibition by Elise Gersky and Flora Ranis.
Elise Gersky is an artist working in painting and sculpture, raised in Columbia Missouri, and based in Northfield, Minnesota. She studied sculpture and fine art at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
Gersky’s practice is defined by its fixation on uncomfortable truths, both within the self, and on a societal level. By combining highly refined shapes, explosive, gestural line work, and gonzo typography, her artwork explores the way people think. Her recent sculpture, “Monolith,” incorporates transcripts from popular YouTube videos about transgender individuals to create a common understanding between artist and audience of what information people at large are interested in consuming. Uncomfortable truths, in her practice, are viewed not as obstacles to overcome or avoid, but as subjects that should be earnestly considered.
Flora Ranis is a multidisciplinary sculptor and storyteller from the Florida Everglades whose work explores the sacred mutability of contemporary urban landscapes. She received her BA in 2024 from Yale University, CT, where she pursued ethnic studies and learned to weld.
Rooted in new materialism and the speculative futures of disobedient swampland, Flora’s practice honors matter as an active force and wetlands as sites of porous, shifting infrastructure. Working intimately with steel and soil, Flora highlights the human labor at the heart of industrial production and the delicate, molten nature of manufactured forms. Her works, which feature silk floss flag poles, road sign constellations, and pedestrian signal effigies, investigate the tensions between institutional urban markers and the bodies they aim to regulate, employing physical guide arrows as spiritual guides and emblems of evolved ecosystems. Flora’s work resides between capital, ritual, relic, and desire–reorienting quotidian objects as conceptual artifacts and contemporary myth-makers. Culture, in Flora’s practice, like the structures that shape it, is gooey and amorphous, a warm steel spear pointed toward becoming.