Oliver Herring's Studio

Instead of going to my internship at Max Protetch today, I went with Melissa, a girl in the program, to her internship with Oliver Herring. Oliver is an artist who's represented by Max Protetch. I've written about him before, he was featured on the PBS show Art:21, which you can read about here. Like many artists these days, his craft tends to be dictated by where he's going conceptually, so for a while he'll make videos, then then knit mylar strips, then ask strangers to spit food dye on themselves. Lately he's been making sculptures covered with collaged photos of the subject. First he takes hundreds of photos of every inch of the surface of the subject, then he sculpts it out of styrofoam, then glues cut out pieces of the photos to it. It's an incredibly tedious process, so it helps to have some assistants. He recently finished one of a sitting soldier, and now he's working on one of an eagle. He's trying to get the eagle done before he goes to California next month, because it and the soldier will be shown at Art Basel Miami in early December. Here are some pictures from the studio:


Oliver and Melissa in the studio.


Gluing photos to the base of the eagle.


Those aren't feathers, they're cut out photos of feathers.