Linda Herritt: Terra Infirma / The Boiler (Pierogi), New York

The Boiler (Pierogi) currently presents a two-person exhibition of work by the artists Linda Herritt and Elana Herzog. Each artist presents one large-scale site-specific work at Pierogi’s The Boiler. We attended the opening reception of the show entitled Terra Infirma. In this video, we focus on Linda Herritt’s installation, a text-based wall installation, in a separate, upcoming video, we have a closer look at Elana Herzog’s work.

Linda Herritt makes text-based wall installations constructed of common materials such as tape, yarn, fabric, and chain. Herritt’s site-specific work for The Boiler is based on Robert Smithson’s 1966 drawing, “Heap of Language”, combined with a listing of bands that performed on two nights in Brooklyn. See below for more information on the work.

Linda Herritt: Terra Infirma / The Boiler (Pierogi), New York. Opening reception, November 14, 2014.

> Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.

From the press text:

Linda Herritt makes text-based wall installations constructed of common materials such as tape, yarn, bits of fabric, and chain. The work uses a grid derived from digital wireframe images—found or created—as the architecture supporting short passages of text. The text lists aspects of a specific cultural context, creating an overall field that reveals patterns or attitudes. Subjects range from a listing of bands or a compendium of traditional Chinese brushstrokes, to a collection of prescription drug side effects. The scraps of material used to build the piece often act as stand-ins for drawing materials and techniques, like crosshatching.

For this exhibition, Herritt bases a wall installation on Robert Smithson’s 1966 drawing, “Heap of Language.” Smithson wrote his heap on a sheet of gridded paper; Herritt uses a wireframe grid mapping a mountain in Colorado as her structure. Built of tape, fabric, chains, and yarn, the mountain hugs the wall, folds into a corner, and spills onto the floor. The tension between viewing and reading becomes apparent as one processes simultaneously the knitted web-like skin of the surface and the linear, left to right orientation of the text. Populating the gridded mountain with a listing of bands performing on two nights in Brooklyn, Herritt creates a double map with opposing timeframes: one geological, the other cultural. The text, overlaid onto the warped grid, while recognizable, becomes nearly unreadable and confounds expectations of legibility and of language making sense.

Linda Herritt lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her installations and drawings have been included in exhibitions in numerous galleries and institutions in the US, Mexico, and Europe, including the San Francisco Art Institute (SF, CA), the Drawing Center (NY, NY), Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (CO), Arti et Amicitiae and 1K Project Space (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), among others. She is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, and a NEA Sculpture Fellowship. She participated in the International Artist in Residence Program in Vienna, with US residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, Art/Omi, and the Marie Walsh Sharpe New York Studio Program.

Photo set on Flickr:
Linda Herritt and Elana Herzog at The Boiler, Pierogi, NYC

Posted in: art, New York, no comment, VernissageTV