The Frye Art Museum is exploring new ground with a series of exhibits by contemporary artists who bring a bold, fresh look to the museum. The visitor can still see the extensive display of well-loved items from the permanent collection, but complementing these works are temporary exhibits that challenge perceptions about representational art and encourage dialog about its diversity and complexity.
The latest of these arresting exhibitions is "Oliver Herring: Taking and Making." This is Herring's first solo exhibition in the Northwest, although his work has been shown in top museums both domestically and internationally.
Born in Germany, educated at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford University, he obtained his master's in fine art at Hunter College in New York, the city in which he currently works.
Herring is a multimedia artist who began as a painter, moved into soft sculpture created from knitted Mylar and then moved on to hard sculpture and photography. Knitting appealed to him, he says, because of its continuity: it's an endless line of stitches creating something whole that can be subdivided into innumerable, repetitive actions.
That flow and subdivision is at the heart of his most recent work, spotlighted in the current exhibition. And in each of the pieces on display we see new works that have been fashioned from deconstructed fragments of something else. Herring excels at deconstructing and then constructing.
Of particular note is a sculpture entitled "Oliver," which was completed this year on commission and is being shown for the first time in this Frye exhibition. "Oliver" is a sculptural self-portrait created from carved polystyrene onto which thousands of fragmented digital photos have been affixed.
To create the work, Herring sculpted his life-size form out of the polystyrene. His partner then took more than 1,000 photographs of Herring lying in the position of the sculpture. The photos were printed and duplicated, and Herring covered the form with bits and pieces cut from the 2,000-plus images. The finished work is at the intersection of photography and sculpture, and somewhere between realism and abstraction.
There Oliver lies on the floor within a vitrine. It's a very realistic figure composed of thousands of abstract bits of Oliver-the-man photos. Oliver-the-sculpture lies on its back, holding up a complete photo of Oliver-the-person at which the sculpture of Oliver gazes intently. Count the layers of representation in that one piece!
The five-monitor video installation entitled "Little Dances of Misfortune" exemplifies another medium in which Herring incrementally builds a large work of art from tiny fragments. In it, performers do little more than walk, fall, dive and climb, but they do it in a darkened studio where the only light is that reflected from the phosphorescent paint on the performers and their props.
Herring plays with the individual photographic frames recorded by the motion picture camera. He calls these "the integers of film." Instead of using the moving images, he has isolated frames and reassembled some of them to suggest increments of movement. These discrete motion segments put the viewer in the midst of a whirl of color and line that appears to be moving. The music that accompanies the videos is also made of snippets. Herring reworked the bits and pieces to construct the flowing sound he wanted.
The overall effect is ultracontemporary, yet it has powerful historical roots. Think of the jumpy pace typical of the earliest motion pictures. Think of Busby Berkeley, the great stage and screen choreographer of the 1930s. And think back to the groundbreaking images created by 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, whose linear strips of still photos of men running and horses trotting provided the first insights into the mechanics of everyday movement.
In "Do Two Monologues Make a Dialog?" two intersecting lines of photos stretch down the length of a specially created gallery wall. The top line of photos documents the moods and actions of a young woman. The line that begins at the bottom and eventually intersects the other line reveals the private life of a man. Herring meets his subjects by chance or through ads he places in local papers. This piece was conceived when he was doing a residency in Texas, and these people agreed to allow him to photograph them in their homes. Look closely at the point where the two intersect, and ask yourself what Herring is doing here and what we're doing looking in on it. As with all his works, your experience as the viewer is the final component of this reality.
The photo-documentation of a performance piece, "TASK," that he staged in Paris is a teaser for Seattle audiences. If Robin Held, Frye's chief curator and director of exhibitions and collections, has her way, Herring will return to Seattle to stage a similar event. Mark it on your calendars if and when it happens. Meanwhile, you have until Sept. 18 to see the current exhibit.
"Oliver Herring: Taking and Making" continues through Sept. 18 at the Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry Ave. Tuesday-Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursdays until 8 p.m., Sundays noon to 5 p.m. 622-9250. Free parking and admission.[[In-content Ad]]
