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6/3/2008

Brandon Herman

Envoy enterprises, New York

Brandon Herman’s first solo show with envoy, concerns a childhood abduction fantasy that has haunted Herman and around which he has built a dark and playful body of work. The exhibition consists of large-scale photographs and a sculpture that are employed in an installation that examines the complex relationship between memory, fantasy and mainstream media.

When Herman was younger, growing up in the suburbs of Northern California, what frightened and enticed him most was the idea of being kidnapped, taken away from all that he knew, given a new identity and being cared for in extravagant ways that afforded him a lifestyle he could only fantasize about. In his fantasy he found relief from a nagging fear, but he also realized that he was living with some level of delusion. He began to become lost in an endless cycle of back and forth between daydream and nightmare.

The work that results from Herman’s meditation on the abstract and uncomfortable language of fear is visually related to the Hollywood films of horror legend John Carpenter (The Fog, Prince of Darkness), but also comes close to the creepiness of home videos that might be found on youtube. In these works exact details are obscured by the darkness of the images, leaving room for the inference of beauty and sexiness and the contradiction of impending mayhem.

At the center of "My Vacation With A Kidnapper” is Herman’s monument to an image from childhood that comes from the unconscious of anyone who ever watched cartoons and marveled at the one indestructible and magical character. This character was often a cat who just narrowly escapes death, or appears to die in one cartoon and is alive again the next. The sculpture — a 5-foot tall cast fiberglass cartoon cat-head — is the most direct exploration of the idea of the blurred-into-one-cat, the likeness of all cartoon cats that one might remember. This could even be the cat that one was watching at the exact moment when one would have been abducted.

Brandon Herman was born in Hillborough, California in 1983. He is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design. His work has been shown both nationally and internationally, most notably with Wessel and O’Connor Fine Art, Brooklyn, David Gallery, Culver City, and Galerie Griesmar et Tamer, Paris. His images have been published in Anthem, Artforum, Celeste, Dazed and Confused, Eyemazing, Flaunt, H Magazine, NY Arts Magazine, Soma, Tokion, V Magazine and Vice.

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131 Chrystie Street - New York

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