River Melt is a site-specific project that calls attention to the perception of time as duration and marks the passing of time. Responding to the location of the Art Association along the banks Susquehanna River and its view through the windows of the 2nd floor gallery, I sourced the water for each cast from the river. Each day of this exhibition, a new ice cast will be installed and will melt, drop by drop, into a container. These containers will be displayed to mark each passing day of the exhibit. A contact mic is used to amplify the sound of the melting ice.
The installation Square Paper and Air is activated when viewers enter the space and their motion triggers a series of the fans, causing a grid of square papers to respond to the air current. The moving paper makes the air current tangible and calls attention to our contingent connections. The squares of paper are arranged in a grid relative to the dimensions of the wall.
In the work To Scale, I have recreated the dimensions of the 2nd floor galley at one-half and one-tenth inch scales to punctuate the physical and conceptual constructs of the space. The work I have installed is an obvious construction. It is situated in a room, that despite its fixed appearance, is also a construction. Spectators are invited to view a smaller version of the space that they are simultaneously walking through and consider their relationship to the scale of the constructs.
Sound frames explores how the medium of sound can be used to make a space specific to an object. Starting at the Art Association, I walked with the frames around the block. I recorded the sounds the frames created and captured the ambient noises from the pedestrian space outdoors while walking.
Morning Duty is an exploration of time and routine during a duty that was assigned as part of my teaching responsibilities last year. I stood outside the cafeteria doors from 7:22 to 7:37 daily as students arrived and took a picture each morning with my cell phone. I focused on the the changing patterns that occurred within the familiar framework around me.
On view as part of “Project Pattern” at the Susquehanna Art Museum through August 2021: https://www.susquehannaartmuseum.org/galleries/project-pattern/
Arts in Foggy Bottom Outdoor Sculpture Biennial:
Turf and Terrain
Turf and Terrain is built from the stuff of Foggy Bottom. Looking to the area’s industrial roots, architectural heritage, and natural history, this exhibition unearths, uproots, and expands the landscape and legacy of Foggy Bottom with new life, new monuments, and new inhabitants with new stories to tell. –Danielle O’Steen, Turf and Terrain Curator
Thirteen contemporary sculptures and public artworks will be on view in the Foggy Bottom Historic District for the 2016 Arts in Foggy Bottom Outdoor Sculpture Biennial. The exhibition, presented by the award-winning Arts in Foggy Bottom, one of Washington’s leading public art programs, runs from Saturday, May 14 through Saturday, October 22.
Curator Danielle O’Steen selected local, regional and international artists whose works will be installed on site in front of private homes throughout the Foggy Bottom neighborhood. This year’s show, Turf and Terrain, will be rooted in the sites and stories of Foggy Bottom, while taking on an expanded notion of medium and sculpture. Artists will engage the legacy of historic Foggy Bottom ranging from the figural, the abstract, and even the fantastical; to interactive, performative, and new media works.
Ice Cups is a site-specific project that calls attention to the perception of time as duration and utilizes light to make visible the perception of sound.
Ice Cups was part of SHIMMER: The Art of Light, a one-night, free,
public event of light-based art and performance spanning Chapel Hill and Carrboro, North Carolina.
http://shimmerevent.com/
Photos by Alex Kormann.
464 Gallery
Buffalo, New York
"Every context has its frames and its ideological overtones."
- Richard Serra
Working loosely in the spirit of the ethnographer, we study and respond to different aspects of cultural phenomena through diverse approaches. “Context Contingent” is a selection of work from 7 artists working in a variety of materials and formats. The participating artists question their relationship to context and consider their work as contingent upon these relationships. Our work seeks to demystify and revel in our familiar, lived environments, while simultaneously framing and fracturing the ideological underpinnings.
The ethical nature of intersubjectivity as it relates to larger issues of politics and culture is a slippery slope. Our intention is to articulate various ways of responding and relating to context, bringing the circumstances and conditions that surround us to the foreground. We ask the viewer to consider their own relationship to context, how these circumstances reflect who they are, and to question the fluidity and changeability of these contextual factors. Using a variety of media and approaches, we each scrutinize how the individual relates to their environment and others. Personal, physical, and formal boundaries are questioned and pushed through these artistic inquiries.
The artists included in the show include Erin Barach (Baltimore, MD), Laura Borneman (Buffalo, NY), Nicole Herbert (Harrisburg, PA), Ashley Lathe (Charlotte, NC), Joy Moore (Houston, TX), Nikki Moser (Scranton, PA)and Miguel Navarro (Los Angeles, CA).
concrete, plaster, wax, tin, and tissue paper
2015
Fenêtre Gallery
February 2013
In my practice I am guided by the question, “How can art be used to call attention to things that we take for granted?” In keeping with Victor Skhlovsky’s idea of ostranenie, or having the familiar or commonplace made strange, I seek to highlight overlooked aspects of everyday contexts and objects. This idea is also related to Bertold Brecht’s use of alienation effects in the Epic Theater. In the Epic Theater, Brecht wanted his viewers to sit back and judge. The world was not inevitable and unchanging. For Brecht, the world on stage is made, not given, just like the world outside.[1]
For the exhibition, Constructs, I have used sculpture, drawing, and photography to punctuate the physical and conceptual constructs of the gallery space and surrounding environment. After studying the architecture and dimensions of the Fenêtre Gallery, I have translated everyday elements of the space into different materials and juxtaposed these variations with the existing elements. In each variation, I use materials so that viewers can tell what the objects are made out of. The work I have installed in the Fenêtre Gallery is an obvious construction and it is situated in a room that, despite it’s fixed appearance, is also a construction. I am curious about the construction of meaning and am thinking about how this construction can be a more dynamic process.
In an article called Semiotics and Art History, Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson state that “In everyday life, we tend not to question what is conventional; we don’t even notice it.”[2] In my work, I am investigating what is conventional in the materials that are part of our daily life. Rather than not noticing these materials, I am attempting to encourage more active perceptions of our physical environment and am considering the extent to which we can have agency with these perceptions.
[1] Brecht, Bertold. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964 (195).
[2] Bal, Mieke and Norman Bryson. Semiotics and Art History. In The Art Bulletin, Vol. 73, No. 2, pp. 174 – 208. The College Art Association: 1991 (191).
In the project Tracing, I use thin white tape to trace the outlines of reflections or the view through windows. The fixed outline invites pedestrians to pause in otherwise transitory situations and consider their shifting relationship to the static tape.
The Tracing project started in Harrisburg, PA on local bus stops and has been included in several public art projects, including Art in Odd Places: Sign (NYC, NY), Look on Lancaster Avenue (Philadelphia, PA), In Light Richmond (VA), and Space Gallery (Pittsburgh, PA).
Flood Lights
glazed ceramic, bisque fired ceramic, casting slip greenware, porcelain greenware, wax
plaster, concrete, paper mache, black tape, clear tape
Drop Ceiling
ceiling tiles, clamp light, extension cord, motion sensor
January 2011
For this site-specific exhibition, artists Julie Benoit, Leah Cooper, Nicole Herbert, and Elena Volkova approached our stripped down gallery and its immediate surroundings in a way that questions how we construct and experience space. Shadows, lines, reflections, and architectural features culminate to form an impression of a place as we inhabit it but rarely do we deconstruct it piece by piece.
Much like a film still, these works encourage us to stop and dissect our everyday experiences, and push us to consider the details that we would have otherwise overlooked. These works require us to acutely engage our sensory perceptions; an exercise that need not end once we exit the gallery and reemerge into the “real world.” There the only difference is that the ‘works of art’ created by our surroundings do not have formal titles.
Actions and work that have taken place over time contribute to the current appearance of our surrounding environment. In the project, Actions, thin white tape and a marker are used to call attention to a variety of actions and work that have occurred in surrounding environment. The documentation on view invites viewers to consider the construction of their seemingly fixed and unchanging environment.
Actions around Studio A - 2012
Actions in and Around Meyerhoff - 2014
Actions in Constructs - 2013
inkjet prints, tape, marker
The project, Paper Clips, consists of an exploration of time and routine during In School Suspension, a duty that was part of my teaching responsibility for 40 minutes every day. Each paper clip contains a caption with the date and time spent drawing. The materials used in the project were readily accessible in the ISS room, as I drew on 3x3 inch post-it notes from the room and used a subject matter that was on the table where I sat.
Attic - 1:2:12
cardboard
2014
Alienation
tissue paper
2014
Yellow Wall Gallery
plaster, ink jet prints, wooden frames
2012
The semiotician Charles S. Peirce defines an Index as a “sign, or representation, which refers to its object . . . because it is in dynamical (including spatial) connection both with the individual object, on the one hand, and with the senses or memory of the person for which it serves as a sign, on the other hand.”[1]
In the project, Indices, I establish indexical relationships between my work and the surrounding environment by framing details of the space and representing these framed areas as both photographs and plaster casts. I’m interested in investigating the contingencies between these objects and our experience of our everyday environment.
[1] ‘Dictionary of Philosophy & Psychology' vol. 1, CP 2.305, 1901; Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 volumes, vols. 1-6, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, vols. 7-8, ed. Arthur W. Burks. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931-1958.
Flashpoint Gallery
found pipes, motion sensors, lights, graphite
July 2011
Nicole Herbert’s Trace was an intervention into the forgotten spaces of Flashpoint. Herbert’s site-specific works took place throughout the entire Flashpoint incubator space, reminding the viewer of overlooked areas and subtle architectural features. Herbert used drawing, three-dimensional sculptural forms and found objects to activate the hallways, stairwells and offices at Flashpoint.
Fox 3: Corners and I-beams
paper, papier mache, wood, cardboard, plaster, concrete, wire, acrylic
Cafe Doris: bottles and cups
plaster, glass, wax, mirrors
June 2009
Fox Building, 3rd Floor Gallery
Maryland Institute College of Art
Baltimore, MD
Nicole Herbert disrupts the routine experience of the mundane by drawing attention to context and experimenting with materials and scale. In the gallery setting of her split installation Material Permutations, she first measured the walls as well as the hidden and visible structural supports. She then applied various ratios to build corners, a door, and I-beams from paper, papier maché, Plexiglas, cardboard, wire, wood, concrete, and plaster, and filled the empty white space. In the building’s café, she juxtaposed along a window ledge an actual cup and bottle with cast, fabricated and reflected simulacra according to material and means of production, letting viewers make their own arrangements. Although her underlying systems remained elusive, her interventions succeeded in triggering flashes of understanding into the contingency of the lived environment.
Sarah Tanguy, Curator
ART in Embassies Program, and independent curator and critic
Missing bricks were found in Harrisburg, PA and replaced with plaster cast bricks. Every two weeks, a postcard documenting the brick and a written caption were mailed to the visitors of the Susquehanna Art Museum as part of the Harrisburg: Past, Present, Future exhibition.
The Brick Placement project was also repeated in Baltimore, MD and displayed in the Pinkard Gallery at the Maryland Institute College of art.
http://goforchange.com/2008/07/08/mica-pinkard-gallery-nicole-herbert/
