Oliver Herring: Areas for Action
January 21–March 7, 2015
Foil Ball closing reception: Saturday, March 7, noon–6pm
DiverseWorks
4102 Fannin Street, #200
Houston, TX 77004
Hours: Wednesday–Saturday noon–6pm
www.diverseworks.org
Areas for Action blog
Oliver Herring’s artistic practice utilizes various methods to create a space in which individuals come together to perform actions that consider personal relationships, beauty, and social justice. Through his artwork he deploys queer, conceptual, and formal languages to investigate how action and art education point to radical frontiers. Throughout the 1990s, Herring became known for his hand-knit Mylar and tape sculptures that were inspired by and paid tribute to the playwright and drag performer Ethyl Eichelberger, who committed suicide in 1991 after being diagnosed with AIDS. Since then, his practice has expanded to include improvised stop-motion videos and collaborative performances, at first involving friends and eventually volunteer participants. Herring uses these collaborative and experimental techniques to investigate human nature and reveal interpersonal dynamics. He sets up an open-ended process in order to display the poignancy implicit in humanity when strangers expose their vulnerabilities and embrace trust.
Herring’s ongoing project, Areas for Action, is a concept for an accumulative exhibition consisting of daily performances, improvisatory sculptures, and real-time collaborative artworks created on-site utilizing a variety of materials—glitter, tape, body paint, tin foil, food dye, and photo cut-outs. Taking its title from the artist’s utilization of the gallery space, Areas for Action divides the exhibition and performance spaces into discrete areas for specific interventions and actions. Each day a new group of volunteers joins Herring as he directs and documents these open-ended, process-based performances. Gallery visitors are invited to participate or simply observe. Neither wholly an exhibition nor a time-based performance, Areas for Action removes boundaries between objects and the actions people perform to make them. Gradually the layers of materials, photographic documentation, and traces of past performances become an expanding visual archive of the project marked by intense visual activity, color, and materiality. Herring also redefines the roles of artist and audience, often becoming an observer of others performing in situations that he designs but can never fully control. The creative process becomes a site of vulnerability and risk-taking, a social experiment, and an open laboratory for innovative modes of representation.
About the artist
Oliver Herring was born in 1964 in Heidelberg, Germany and lives and works in New York. He received his BFA from the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford, England; and his MFA from Hunter College, New York. Herring’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London; The Kyoto Art Center, Japan; the 10th Lyon Biennale, France; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; and The Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas. In 2009, a 15-year survey of Herring’s work, Me Us Them, was organized at the Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY. Herring was featured on Season 3 of PBS’s program “Art21, Art in the 21st Century.” In 2014, A4 Contemporary Art Center in Chengdu, China, organized Herring’s solo exhibition, LINK.
About DiverseWorks
DiverseWorks is a non-profit art center in Houston, Texas, dedicated to commissioning and presenting new visual, performing, and literary art. DiverseWorks values the artistic process and encourages artists to test new ideas in the public arena. By investigating the social, cultural, and artistic issues of our time, DiverseWorks builds, educates, and sustains audiences for contemporary art.
Support
This project is supported in part by grants from The Hollyfield Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Texas Commission on the Arts, and the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance.
DiverseWorks season sponsors: The Brown Foundation, Inc., and The Houston Endowment.