Michelle Lisa Herman: Always, Already, Never, Better, Faster, Stronger

About

Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, our relationship to technology and space has shifted. We have had to redefine how we navigate space publicly (limiting our interactions with each other), privately (spending more time at home than ever before), and virtually (employing systems like Zoom for work, school, and personal interactions). While technology has always served as a filter—mediating and presenting a version of reality to us—the effect has been heightened by the pandemic. "Always, Already, Never, Better, Faster, Stronger" explores the new realities produced by technology and the new ways that hidden structures of power permeate them.

Through installations, soft sculpture, video, print, and kinetic work, an absent-but-always-present force threads its way through the exhibition. Because these invisible systems of power are never singular in their sources, the works, likewise, explore this idea through an intersection of various threads: the question of agency, technology and the body, and the relationship between commodity and value production to labor.

Drawing references from art history, the contemporary art world, tech culture, consumerism, and feminism, the works provide juxtapositions of incongruent ideas or materials aimed to destabilize the viewer’s assumptions to reveal new possibilities of being and embodiment. This method also relates to two ongoing interests in the artist's work: humor (which often employs unexpected combinations of ideas) and the sublime (that which is both compelling and terrifying at the same time).