Dan Herschlein Looks Inside | Art21 "New York Close Up"

When I was younger, I would do this a lot.

I would cut faces or pictures out of books

and I would tape them to sticks--

set them up in my room
and shine lights at them,

so that when I turned my own lights off,

they were reflected in my windows.

I was trying to get over
being scared of this idea

of this presence in my window.

I wouldn't say that that actually helped.

But it was sort of exhilarating.

It was sort of fun.

And it was the beginning of a process
that maybe is helping me.

The voyeur in my work is not supposed
to be a scary or threatening presence

in the way that I feel like it's often
portrayed in movies and novels.

It's maybe somebody that feels
just outside the equation.

The voyeur is actually
what I am in the process.

["Dan Herschlein Looks Inside"]

[Dan Herschlein, artist]

I was driving out to Long Island each day
to work on these sculptures

in the den in my parents house on Long Island.

They gave me half of the room

and rest of it was everything else
that was in the room,

pushed over.

The sculptures are very much
based on Long Island,

and my growing up there,

and my feelings of growing up there--

and the specific kind of
aloneness that I felt there.

Part of my fantasy about this place

was that I was going to be able to
stay up all night working in here

and be alone.

But then my parents are sleeping

and I can't even, like,
drill into the wood.

Realizing that this
fantasy of solitude

is just not even real.

The "Night Pictures,"

they're a sequential set of images

that are of plaster reliefs on wood.

They are different from other pieces

in that they've really accepted
the fact that they're on a picture plane.

It's using a rectangular form
to say the same thing that

I often try to say with
a sculpture on the floor.

What people deem to be creepy--

categorize as horror--

that's the language
or the genre

I think that I'm working within,
is horror.

The thing that I'm emphasizing
within that is

desire for comfort
or need for comfort

or even the ability of horror to comfort.

Before I was even
making sculptures or anything,

a close friend of mine died in a fire.

I built up this leg

that I made to look as if it was burnt.

I kept coating it and coating it

until it became the flesh of a normal leg.

That was the beginning of me making
these more figurative sculptures.

There's definitely fear involved.

There's a pain to that.

But it's more helpful than
just sitting with my own thoughts.

I think it was important to do
something with my hands.

There's certain body parts
in each sculpture that I'll cast.

Cast my hands, my feet,

my knees, my nipples.

Those are the things that give
more a sense of reality to these things.

It lets everything else fade
and break down at points.

The big mission of mine
is reevaluating maleness and masculinity.

The ability of a man to bury their own emotions

to a point where they
can't even find them again

is unparalleled.

The headlessness is because of
the head just being totally inverted.

It's absolutely just down inside the body.

It feels really emasculating
in this really great way to me.

It's a kind of self reflection.

I am very anxious.

I am scared.

I am sad.

But here are these moments where,

if I can look at that at face value--

see these things--

maybe it's fine to be scared or sad

or anxious.

It's not such a threat or something.

It's just normal.