Nick Herman

Upright Flute (2021)
Barro cocido
30 x 30 x 127 cm

Nick Herman is an artist, writer and publisher who lives in Los Angeles. He makes work in a diverse range of media, including photography, sculpture and sound as well as drawing and books. Recent solo exhibitions include URANANTENNA at Grice Bench (2017) and Hide at Artist Curated Projects (2016). Herman is the founder of ANTEPROJECTS an independent publishing project, in addition to a collaborating member of The Modeling Agency and Mochi-LA. Recent writing has been published in X-tra, The Third Rail, and diSONARE. He is a lecturer at The University of California, Riverside.

Herman’s diverse practice is focused on distilling meaning from process based media, highlighting the value systems and unseen resonances that exist in society’s relationship with “nature” and the residue that marks this exchange.

This method of recording the invisible and often erased elements of social history, and mapping their complex legacies, revolves around Herman’s dual reading of science (the study of flora fauna and other ecologies) and myth, and can be understood as loosely alchemical; alchemy, in this case, refers to a belief that everything is connected and unstable. As such his art practice is also analogous to the garden—a highly charged and fraught symbolic interface between civilization and the wild. In Herman’s ongoing research the concept of evolution and the frayed legacies of “progress” that define post-colonial landscapes can be traced back to this original framing and control of nature.

In light of these architectonic forces, the artist’s practice extends to documenting and hacking systems of belief—seeing religion and technology as interchangeable units of measure—thereby linking these occult epistemological forms and highlighting their common origins. One such form is that of the antenna—a familiar symbol or device used to receive and transmit signals. For Herman, the antenna is a means of visualizing the force field in which we live and work as well as the underlying logic of connectivity that links divergent life forms from humans to insects.