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The centerpiece is Do Two Monologues Make a Dialogue?, a linear pair of snapshot sequences that intersect in on a gray wall. The images result from the trust Herring built with people in diverse worlds. One storyline features teenage girls hanging out after school; the other focuses on a young man who teases the camera with his body and his possessions. Like a movie unfolding, each image is a successive moment—until the two worlds collide in the center. For a single photograph, the girls replace the man in his living room, casting doubt on the idea that snapshots are truthful, and suggesting that these stories could be a fiction, with no actual beginning or end.
The Day I Persuaded Two Brothers To Turn Their Backyard Into A Mud Pool is constructed to mimic a newspaper. The editioned piece is filled with images of brothers horsing around in their muddy backyard. The format confounds expectations of an objective, linear story on the very pages of a medium that is assumed to be just that. In another work, a vitrine, strategically frosted, sits atop a long table. Windows have been left clear, framing photos taken backstage at the rodeo. The images are further filtered and fetishized with red and black marker, resulting in a multitude of slightly erotic narratives of cowboys stretching, dressing, and waiting.
With his residency project Oliver Herring has continued an investigation of intimacy while subverting a static medium. Here photography expresses the simultaneously fractured and cohesive nature of life.