Dan Herschlein

56 Henry is delighted to present The Stillness of Eddies, an exhibition of new work by Dan Herschlein. Comprised of a room-sized installation and a collection of works on paper, the exhibition will be on view from November 11 through December 22, 2016.

In the gallery’s front window, Dan Herschlein has built a wall with a fixed, six-pane window. The wall’s innards face the street, making visible the heavy framing, wood lathing, and globs of plaster used to build it. The small window provides a narrow aperture into the gallery, through which an empty bathtub can be seen. The tub is constructed from plywood, plaster, and tinted joint compound, and approximates human scale. It sits atop a plinth covered in grey tile, also made from plywood and joint compound. On the tub’s floor, Herschlein has sculpted in bas-relief a headless human torso, with hands folded across its chest. Water runs from the tub’s faucet through an opening in the base, ringed with concentric ripples molded in plaster, and into a reservoir before circulating back through the spout. A series of framed works on paper, which depict domestic scenes similar to Herschlein’sinstallation, are hung on the gallery’s walls.

Herschlein’s imagery recalls the mise-en-scène of low-budget horror films. He’s particularly drawn to the pregnant atmospheres of “found-footage” movies like The Blair Witch Project and Atrocious, which present videotape found after a disastrous, violent, or paranormal event, purportedly shot by a character in the film. These films heighten the tension of their banal settings by presenting disaster as a foregone conclusion; Herschlein’swork apes these scenarios, enacting their latent terror, but in his installations the scare never comes. His works on paper render similar scenes, but viewed from later points in time, where protagonists have lost their heads and watch the walls crumble around them. But as is so often the case, the moment of trauma remains unseen, hidden behind another door, or lost to a gap in the narrative. Taken together, his works position the viewer as a kind of omniscient narrator, looking on from a perspective outside of time.