Dan Herschlein

This fall JTT is pleased to present an installation by New York based artist Dan Herschlein (b. Bayville, NY, 1989).

Performance dates:

Saturday, September 12th at 7pm

Friday, September 18th at 3pm

Sunday, October 4th at 12pm

Wednesday, October 14th at 6pm

Fitting tightly within the walls of the gallery, Herschlein’s cutaway of a domestic space becomes a set in which the furniture has been intricately rigged together with a series of pulleys and ropes. A body made of plaster and outfitted in pants and a T-shirt suggests the artist’s double, laying motionless on a platform. Above the platform is a hole cut in the ceiling exactly the same size, implying the body may have descended from a room above. The same plaster that constructs the figure rounds the corners of a wooden converted icebox and the edges of the I-beams supporting the ceiling. A chair faces forward and a video camera set before the edge of the room is directed towards the scene. A montage of video footage plays in the viewfinder. Inspired by romantic immersive obsessions, such as those of Oskar Kokoschka, Morton Barlett and Count Carl von Cosel, Herschlein’s doll and interior make eerie caricatures of their originals.

Herschlein will enter this interior, engaging the series of pulleys and ropes to reveal their mechanism on the performance dates specified above. Accompanying the show is the second of a three volume artist’s book that features a text written by Herschlein as well as images of his plaster double throughout its construction in dimly lit environments. The narrative follows a voyeur looking in on an unnerving scene which mirrors Herschlein’s construction in the gallery.

The show is titled The Enthusiast after the hot air balloon attraction in Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Death on the Installment Plan, in which the tattered and outdated spectacle is pedaled tiredly around at the insistence of a deluded inventor, even after audiences’ interest has long since moved on.