Tonight: TASK party previews upcoming Tang exhibition

The latest event in artist Oliver Herring?s ongoing TASK project will be held at Skidmore College?s Case Center Thursday, Nov. 13, from 7-11p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

The Nov. 13 TASK Party offers a taste of what?s to come when Herring?s upcoming exhibition, Oliver Herring: Me Us Them, opens this winter at Skidmore?s Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery. On view from Jan. 31 to June 14, 2009, this 15-year survey exhibition will weave together Herring?s ever-expanding body of work, including portraiture and narrative, performance, dance, photography, and video. Among the works exhibited will be early knit-Mylar sculptures, stop-motion videos, photo-sculptures, and documentation of various TASK events held both nationally and internationally.

Herring describes his project as ?an improvisational, participatory event with a simple structure but ambitious aims.? Inviting participation from any and all interested individuals, a TASK party provides a platform for participants to interact. Its basic structure is founded on two procedural rules: participants are asked to write down a task on a piece of paper and add it to a designated ?task pool,? and to pull a task from that pool and interpret it. When a task is completed, a participant writes a new task, pulls a new task, and so on.

While Herring provides TASK?s grounding framework, participants and their interactions with one another ultimately determine how the event unfolds. As Herring explains, ?The open-ended, participatory structure creates almost unlimited opportunities for a group of people to interact with one another and their environment??and to both create and experience an event the artist describes as ?a complex, ever-shifting, socio-sculptural arrangement of bodies and objects.?

Since 2002, Herring has brought TASK to numerous communities and venues around the world, including the Masonic Temple at the Great Eastern Hotel in London (2002); cole nationale sup rieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris (2002); the former Federal Savings Bank in Lake Worth, Fla. (2003); the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C. (2006); FLUXspace Gallery in Philadelphia (2007, 2008); and the Seattle Public Library in Seattle, Wash. (2008), among others.

Born in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1964, Herring now lives and works in Brooklyn, N.Y. He received a B.F.A. from the University of Oxford?s Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England, and an M.FA from Hunter College in New York. Herring has had solo exhibitions at major New York museums including the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, among others, and has received grants from Artspace, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

For more information, call the Tang Museum at 518-580-5740 or visit the Tang website.