liver Herring is a New York-based artist born in Heidelberg, Germany in 1964. His ever-expanding body of work explores many media, from sculpture and performance to photography and video. Trained as a painter, Herring first gained international attention with his beautifully elegiac sculpture series, A Flower for Ethyl Eichelberger: an Ongoing Project (1991-1994). These larger-than- life (“queen-size”) coats, blankets, and other objects of shelter and comfort, were hand-knit using silver-coated Mylar strips, which were created by cutting up luxury shopping bags. They allude to the unusual figure of actor, camp playwright and drag queen Ethyl Eichelberger – a central presence on New York’s alternative fringe scene – who committed suicide in 1991 after a struggle with AIDS. The ongoing process of knitting, which marks the passage of time, was compatible with the emotional character of Herring’s homage to this unique and beloved figure, and was perceived by Herring as a form of activism related to the struggle against AIDS. “As I knitted (it wasn’t a conceptual decision; it was emotional), I learned that what I opened up through the process was to allow myself time to think. Time was the crux of the matter, lack of time for Ethyl Eichelberger and the time that I had to reflect.” “It was an ‘hommage,’ but at the same time it was a way for me to resolve issues that I had with mortality. I was frightened. That was about me, about me in relation to that death, me in relation to the world.”
His many and varied projects share a common focus on social interactions, human relationships, and creative experimentation. Herring is among a select group of contemporary artists rigorously exploring the dynamic relationship between photography and sculpture, as expressed in his scrupulously rendered photo-sculptures, begun as an image (taken) of its subject, and developed into a sculptural object (made) of thousands of photographic fragments. For these works, Herring painstakingly photographs a model from all possible angles, then cuts and pastes the photographs onto the sculptural form of his subject. “In these photographic pieces, I’m working with a person for two or three months, and that leaves a huge margin for things to happen and change. The person changes- things happen- and change gets incorporated into the piece. I take thousands of photographs. It feels very deconstructive. Then I try to bring it back together again, and that’s the restructuring process.”
Embracing chance and chance encounters, his videos and performances liberate participants to explore aspects of their personalities through art in a way that would otherwise probably be impossible. In a series of large-scale photographs, Herring documents strangers’ faces after hours of spitting colorful food dye, recording a moment of exhaustion and intensity that doubles as a form of abstract painting.
