Patrick

Oliver Herring often takes his studio with him on the road, where he seeks out people he wouldn’t meet under normal circumstances. A man named Patrick posed for Herring in several studio sessions in which the artist photographed the model’s body in intimate detail. Herring invites his subjects to determine how they wish to present themselves physically, and Patrick chose a pose from French sculptor Auguste Rodin’s famous work "The Thinker." Herring then carved a shape of Patrick’s body out of foam core and covered it with a patchy skin made of photographs. For Herring, the work comes out of his interest in video. “I took thousands of close-up photos of Patrick’s body from every angle,” he recently told the Blanton, “and if I pasted those together and made a stop-motion video, you could retrace the movement of the camera as I’m discovering and exploring his body. That time-based activity is incorporated into the work. . . . These photo-sculptures presented an outlet for me to dig a little deeper into a particular human story I wouldn’t normally have access to.”