Adriane Herman

Background

About Adriane Herman

I am a publicly engaged print-based artist who has taught technically and conceptually based classes to undergraduates and graduate students at MECA & D since 2002, preceded by 5 years leading the Printmaking program at KCAI. Teaching is a fundamental part of my practice, and I compulsively initiate multi-tentacled collaborations between students and community partners that often deploy activist and entrepreneurial tactics, such as curating shows of artwork by residents of Maine prisons that sometimes yield income, modeling creative entrepreneurship as a potential means of surmounting obstacles to employment people often face due to incarceration. I trace the seemingly alchemical trajectory from intention to action, suspending, amplifying, and readying Though my penultimate body of work involved collecting, studying, and reflecting back thousands of other people’s grocery and other “to do” lists, i.e, preserving other people’s trash, I am resolved that my art now occasion opportunities for myself and others to offload things. I photographically chronicle the ease and grace with which some people jettison objects no longer serving them, as well as waxing and waning mounds of materials ready for repurposing. Monumentalizing both accumulation and release, these intimate yet anonymous communally created heaps embody barely controlled chaos and reflect how we use our most valuable resources of time, energy, attention, and space. Materially manifest in the strata of municipal piles of discarded wood captured in my “Towns Mounds” photos-which inspire my “Wreckage Salad” monotypes-are human intentions, accomplishments, failures, procrastinations, and the inexorable march from birth to death, with (if we’re lucky) many trips to the curb, dump or recycling center in between. My non-monetized “Emotional Value Auctions" harness the power of witnessing to facilitate release, highlight the generosity inherent in receiving, and occasion meaningful connections between strangers through publicly shared vulnerability. No money changes hands; written statements of interest from viewers supplant financial bids, foregrounding alternative metrics of value. Authentic written expression and vulnerability are rewarded, and are rewards in themselves.