Dan Herschlein at Matthew Brown

Dan Herschlein, The Long-Fingered Hand (installation view) (2023). Matthew Brown, Los Angeles, 2023. © Dan Herschlein. Image courtesy of the artist and Matthew Brown. Photo: Paul Salveson.

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates tells of a time in which Leontius, strolling from Piraeus to Athens, came upon a pile of dead bodies dumped by the executioner outside the city walls. He was overwhelmed by dueling impulses: On one hand, he had a strong urge to behold the bodies in all their bloodiness, and on the other, he strove to act rationally and look away. To his frustration, his appetite for gruesomeness supervened.¹ While Plato writes of Leontius’ divided soul, caught between desire and self-regulation, artist Dan Herschlein’s The Long-Fingered Hand fixates on the urge to look during these moments of terror, inflecting familiar domestic spaces with eerie details that blur the boundaries between internality and externality.

The exhibition’s wall reliefs and sculptures transpose visual motifs from F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), an expressionist film loosely adapted from Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), onto more contemporary representations of the home. In these spaces, walls swell with monsters, severed ligaments rest on ledges, and cracked doors intimate chilling forces lurking in the darkness. The works frame the viewer as not only a voyeur to these chilling sights but also as another surveilled subject. While visitors survey windows and door frames protruding from the reliefs, a black video camera affixed to a tripod stands at the back of the gallery (VHS CAMERA, 2023). Suggesting an unseen entity monitoring the space, the sculpture intrudes upon viewers’ typical position of detached looking—even if they are not actually being monitored by this wood, wire, and wax sculpture.

The split status of visitors, who are both viewers and viewed subjects, is further muddied throughout the portal-like wall reliefs. The Lure (2022) positions the viewer inside a house, looking out of a closely cropped window. A distressed face resembling that of Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893) peers through the window, represented with fluid, smokelike facture. Its hands do not grasp its cheeks as in Munch’s original, but rather frame its eyes to better see through the glass. To the right of the window frame, a head protrudes from the flesh-like wall, but its face is cropped by the edge of the canvas. The horror outside is preferable to the horror inside, but Herschlein strands viewers in the peripheral zone in between, left to linger amidst what is seen and unseen, spectral and flesh.

In Herschlein’s world, domestic architecture disturbs the line between safe interior and threatening exterior zones. Shadowy figures float up a picket fence, a familiar symbol of suburban American life, in The Will Of The Wisp (2023). The fence demarcates property lines and protects the home from outside forces. But here, the baleful shadows have penetrated the boundary, and their light source emanates from the house itself. Rather than serving as a protected enclave, the home produces monstrosity through its light, and the fence becomes the screen on which the frightening image is projected. Unlike Leontius, who agonizes over his impulse to gaze upon a dreadful sight, Herschlein embraces it, crafting a liminal experience suspended between the known and the uncanny.

Dan Herschlein: The Long-Fingered Hand runs from November 18, 2023–January 13, 2024 at Matthew Brown (633 N. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90036).

Dan Herschlein, VHS CAMERA (detail) (2023). Wood, wire, India ink, and wax, 39 x 15.5 x 7 inches. © Dan Herschlein. Image courtesy of the artist and Matthew Brown. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Dan Herschlein, The Long-Fingered Hand (installation view) (2023). Matthew Brown, Los Angeles, 2023. © Dan Herschlein. Image courtesy of the artist and Matthew Brown. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Dan Herschlein, We Can Go Through Keyholes and The Will Of The Wisp (installation view) (both 2023). Matthew Brown, Los Angeles, 2023. © Dan Herschlein. Image courtesy of the artist and Matthew Brown. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Dan Herschlein, The Will Of The Wisp (installation view) (2023). Wood, plaster, joint compound, milk paint, wax, fishing line, epoxy putty, colored pencil, and graphite, 72 x 84.5 inches. Matthew Brown, Los Angeles, 2023. © Dan Herschlein. Image courtesy of the artist and Matthew Brown. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Dan Herschlein, The Long-Fingered Hand (installation view) (2023). Matthew Brown, Los Angeles, 2023. © Dan Herschlein. Image courtesy of the artist and Matthew Brown. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Dan Herschlein, The Lure (2022). Milk paint, wax, graphite, colored pencil, and joint compound on wood, 24.25 x 32.75 inches. © Dan Herschlein. Image courtesy of the artist and Matthew Brown. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Dan Herschlein, The Lure (detail) (2022). Milk paint, wax, graphite, colored pencil, and joint compound on wood, 24.25 x 32.75 inches. © Dan Herschlein. Image courtesy of the artist and Matthew Brown. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Dan Herschlein, The Long-Fingered Hand (installation view) (2023). Plaster, joint compound, milk paint, wax, found dresser, paper, and epoxy putty, 47 x 23 x 17.5 inches. Matthew Brown, Los Angeles, 2023. © Dan Herschlein. Image courtesy of the artist and Matthew Brown. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Dan Herschlein, Extension Cord (2023). Wood, plaster, joint compound, milk paint, epoxy putty, colored pencil, and graphite, 28 x 23 inches. © Dan Herschlein. Image courtesy of the artist and Matthew Brown. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Isabella Miller lives and works in Los Angeles.

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