Reception
Thursday, January 18, 5 to 7 pm

“Media & Identity” is a solo show of San Francisco-based artist Lynn Hershman. The exhibition features works that span the artist’s prolific thirty-year career. Included are documents, photographs, and artifacts from Hershman’s multi-year performance project Roberta Breitmore; photographic selections from her Phantom Limb series and Cyborg series; and the acclaimed video work “The Electronic Diary.” All of these works strongly relate to themes central to Hershman’s career: the construction of identity; the blurring of distinctions between art and life; and the interaction between human and machine, blending the physical world with the simulated one.

Begun in 1973, Roberta Breitmore was a ten-year project in which Hershman acted out the life of an invented persona. Roberta was a character so fully realized that we are able to inspect her belongings such as a checkbook, temporary license, a handwritten note and articles of clothing, all of which are included in the show. The Roberta project realized one of Hershman’s most critical artistic goals: to make art as “real” as possible, not “realistic’, but existing in the real world in real time.

Hershman’s creative output ranges from early conceptual works and performances to photo-collages and videotapes, from TV and film productions to interactive installations. Hershman divides her creative periods into two categories: “B.C.” (Before Computers) and “A.D.” (After Digital); 1980 marks the year that Hershman first picked up a video camera and entered her “A.D.” period, discovering video’s alternative space. “The Electronic Diary” (1986-1995) brilliantly captures the alternative space of video with Hershman speaking directly to the camera about her past and present anxieties in a seemingly intimate and private nature. Boundaries between life and art are effectively questioned and inverted in this piece that purports to present the “real” Lynn.

Hershman is currently a professor of Electronic Art at the University of California, Davis. Her work is in numerous collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (N.Y.), the National Gallery of Canada, the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), the ZKM Mediamuseum (Karlsruhe), the Univeristy Art Museum (Berkeley) and the Hess Collection. She has received the Siemens/ZKM Media Arts Award, the Seattle Art Museum’s Gerber Award, the Cyberstar Award, the National Educational Media Award for Innovative Technology; and the Golden Nica Prix Ars Electronic. She is the author of Clicking In, Hotlinks to a Digital Culture, published in 1996 by Bay Press.