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.