AGE: 35
BASED IN: Los Angeles
“Suburbia is a space of theater in my mind,” muses Dan Herschlein from their Los Angeles studio. “You walk down a street at night, and all the streetlights look like stage lights.”
The artist, who grew up in Bayville—a 1.5 square-mile “time warp of a town” on Long Island’s North Shore—is skilled at capturing a sense of yearning and ambient unease, and the sterile artifice of suburban life has proven particularly fruitful subject matter. They grew up working on a clam-digging boat with their dad, who also built furniture. His influence “has really informed the way that I make art,” Herschlein observes. “It’s important to me that the thing is made by my hands. Anyone can relate to a thing that’s made by somebody’s hands.”
Perhaps to honor the trace of Herschlein’s own hand, their work—eldritch reliefs or sculptures rendered in plaster or epoxy putty— undulates. The 35-year-old, who remembers finding comfort in horror films as a child, often returns to haunting motifs of “threshold spaces” like eggs, windows, doors, fences, and beds—fragile boundaries that shield tender things. Last year, a selection of the artist’s eerie tableaux were featured in the Hammer Museum’s “Made in L.A.” biennial. Their corporeal figures appear to be peering or warping, while walls and curtains seem to ripple and stretch, conjuring the discomfiting sensation of membranes shifting.
The context in which their work is shown is top of mind for Herschlein, who holds some reservations about the “alienating and unwelcoming” aspect of gallery spaces and seeks to exhibit in ways that allow for casual public engagement. In 2018, their installation in the window of the New Museum offered passersby a glance at a haunting scene of disjointed body parts—a headless, slumped figure reaching toward a missing limb suspended in the air, which in turn reaches for its long-lost body. “The space where you see the work is not just a room in which I put the work,” reasons Herschlein. “I want it to be something else—like a little burrow to think in.”
