Gallery One, Chicago
On Friday, February 20, 2009, Western Exhibition opens two new shows: In Gallery 1, we present a solo exhibition by Adriane Herman and in Gallery 2, a group show of new prints from Fresh Hot Press, a Madison, Wisconsin-based printmaking shop. Both shows open with a public reception from 5 to 8pm. The shows will run from February 20 – March 28, 2009.
For decades, Adriane Herman has instinctively archived minutiae that others would likely toss out without a thought or, perhaps more likely, never let accumulate in the first place. For her third show at Western Exhibitions, Herman will present a series of inlaid burnishing clay tablets that take their inspiration from other people’s “to do” lists. These wall-mounted tablets have surfaces that are extraordinary in every sense of the word – shiny, sensuous, even sublime. To make these works, Herman transposes a larger reproduction of her source image (a “to do” list) to a wooden board coated with 20 thin layers of burnishing clay. She carves out the text and fills it in with thin layers of an opposing color of clay. Next, she sands, polishes and burnishes the top layer of clay until the text/image is revealed, a laborious and time-consuming process whose resulting shine, that sublime surface, is all elbow grease – no varnishes or coatings. It has to be seen in person to be truly appreciated.
Nadine Wasserman, an independent critic and curator, aptly describes Herman’s intentions in an essay for the show “Ruminant” held at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Portland, Maine:
Adriane Herman takes items that would normally be discarded and transforms them. Herman has collected an archive of other people’s shopping and “to do” lists as a way to ascertain human action and intention and to reveal the human compulsion for order. List-making is often a coping mechanism and a way to organize an otherwise chaotic world. By recreating these lists in a more permanent and labor-intensive medium, Herman makes them monumental. Like a forger, she copies the look of the list as closely as possible into a clay medium and then burnishes the surface into a fine polish. In this way, they are transformed into culturally significant artifacts. Each list reveals individual characteristics about its anonymous writer. Some are neat, others are messy. While many of them list food items, some are statements of intention: “Get colored yarn. Only wool, no acrylic,” “earn the resources to finish house and pay off debt,” or “Lunch, check-in, nap, movie, dinner, drinks, sex, breakfast.” One particular list even has corrected spelling. Unlike more public documents, these bits of scrap paper exhibit inventories that were never intended for anyone but the writer. By monumentalizing this mundane activity, Herman shows us a raw and unrefined version of our own transient objectives.
Adriane Herman’s recent solo shows include the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, Kansas and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport, Maine. She has been included in group shows at the International Print Center in New York City, Adam Baumgold Gallery in NYC, Lump Gallery in North Carolina, the Portland Museum of Art in Maine and the Corcoran Museum of Art in Washington, DC, among several others. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of Art, Adobe Systems in San Francisco, Hallmark Cards in Kansas City, the Herbert F Johnson Museum of American Art in Ithaca, New York, the Progressive Corporation in Cleveland, and several other collections. Herman lives and works in Portland, Maine.