HERSHORN, Berenicci

To Be And…
Friday October 31 8 pm
Artscape Youngplace

Tides of data shimmer at the margins like fireflies on some summer night. Something is there demanding… something… We try to catch it then we slip away.

A memory. A feeling. An urgency suppressed. A glimpse through the curtain. A mystery. A debt.

What do we see when we stop and listen? Stay with the moment. Look. And look away.

Tangential to the noise and frenzy. Through a window. Or a door. Something is happening. Or happened. Or will happen. Now.

Time as a well worn circle. Feathers floating down.

Berenicci Hershorn is a Toronto based artist who has, in both solo and collaborative works, produced a unique body of site-specific art over a period spanning more than 40 years. The work, informed by research applied tangentially, incorporates performance, video, sculpture and installation. It includes various public art commissions as well as an extensive history of recognition in art venues around the world.

Jenn Snider’s eyewitness account
Jenn Snider’s eyewitness account of Language sound body artist panel

Sounds come first. Then an image.
Words, if they come at all, come individually.
They pile up on separate slips of paper and wait to be arranged.
Language is difficult and wily and crazy
But a word by itself is a beautiful thing.

My work is based on long digressions
Following light trails through the labyrinth of thought.
When the investigation doubles back upon itself
Unfettered from the weight of definition
Ideas come to crystallize around a central core
Ordering themselves in stories like pixels in a photograph.
You reach to touch and own a handful
And the picture blurs and melts away.

I like to crack time open like an egg.
Stay with it and go deep.
Slow right down and live inside the moment.
Examine every infinite detail
Working painstakingly towards the centre
Until it all comes clear.
Or disappears.

The riddle.
The conundrum.
Measurements in more than one dimension.
How an onion peels away to nothing.
How a spiral opens a flat plane into space.
Stories that circle endlessly but take you somewhere.
A subtle switch of juxtaposition
That can change the familiar in startling ways
Freeze you in the moment with fear or wonder
No longer secure in the order of things.

My time is dream time.
Repetitive. Non linear.
No past. No present. No future.
No rhyme. No reason.
Random.
Non predictable.
A ball rolls around a roulette wheel
And all those moments of loft and spin
Are captured. Frozen. Analyzed.
Then you’re back where you were
And the view has changed.

I like the altar.
The fairground.
A good play of light.
The ephemerality of memory.
Dust.
And how writing and rewriting
Telling and retelling
We pick and choose our existence
Out of the cacophony.

Call it science
Or alchemy
Or the spaces in between.
In the loosing of connections
Is where I find my work.

Turn a card.
Gaze into the fire.
Spell it out in leaves.

— BERENICCI HERSHORN

find here here
Saturday October 30 8 pm
XPACE Cultural Centre

I see the world as mythic metaphor on a personal scale and in larger connotations. I flirt with order but I’m fascinated by chaos. I’m enthralled by the element of chance. I create conceptual patterns out of cultural detritus. Organizational systems, information technology, the protocols of war and personal displacement. Each element is examined, dissected and re-contextualized. My goal as an artist is to create an experience that captures a moment and suspends it out of time—a searing vision that persists long after the context gently fades away.

Berenicci Hershorn’s work incorporates performance, video, sculpture and installation. She has produced a unique body of site-specific art over a period of 40 years, as well as public art commissions, solo and collaborative performance work and a recognized international exhibition history.

Natalie Loveless’s eyewitness account