ADRIANE HERMAN

About the Exhibition

Adriane Herman explores cycles of accumulation and release in our physical and emotional landscapes. The show invited visitors to consider individual and collective consumption as manifest in five mini-bales of recyclable materials that non-profit solid waste manager, Ecomaine, compressed and loaned for the exhibition. Also on view were photographs Herman took of our trash being incinerated and our recycling being sorted both mechanically and by hand.

Herman pressed pause on the recycling process to allow visitors to contemplate their own patterns of consumption, as well as the various conduits for release available to us, and the personal, cultural, and global implications of material excess and disposability. To facilitate such reflections, Out of Sorts included benches fabricated from salvaged wood by Benjamin Spalding and upholstered by Amy Emmons with fabric printed with Herman’s photographs of bales of recycling and municipal woodpiles. Visitors sat on the plushly cushioned benches to register the visual, visceral, and psychological impact of what she called “simultaneously minimalist and maximalist monuments to communal efforts to keep things out of the landfill.” Materially manifests in the strata of these intimate yet anonymous commodities is evidence of how we eat, drink, work, play, and clean, and how much attention we pay to discarding things responsibly.

About the Artist 

Herman has exhibited widely and lectured at over fifty institutions. Her work is in collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. She is a Professor of the MFA in Visual Art at Maine College of Art, and holds a BA from Smith College and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Out of Sorts, a subsidiary of Herman’s projects Goods Riddance, and The Freeing Throwers, was facilitated by ecomaine, Hour Exchange Portland, The KISMET Foundation, and Yarmouth Public Works.