Jonn Herschend

Projects- Delayed Reaction

The show, "Delayed Reaction," was installed at Tag Gallery in Nashville, TN in November of 2006. Mike McConnell and I proposed the show to Jerry Dale McFadden (the gallery’s owner… who, by the way, runs an amazing gallery) back in September 05 as a collaborative narrative experiment. Jerry Dale gave us the green light, and we started working on it back in San Francisco.

One of us would make an art piece and leave it on the wall of the studio, and then the other one would see it and create a reaction to it. Our main rule was that we could not discuss the direction of the pieces; all interaction had to be visual. The collaboration took place over a three-month period. In some cases, reactions were created immediately, in other cases, reactions took several days to create. During all of this, narratives began to emerge between many of the pieces.

We decided to use thread as a way to pull the narratives together. The metaphor of the thread also seemed appropriate both in the context of the maze like structure of the overall project and as a sort of allusion to the myth of Theseus and the psychological aspects of the journey into the maze. There are 11 narratives, or series of reactions, and each color thread represents one of the narratives. But in some cases, the narratives merge and collide with other threads. And other cases the threads drift off on their own.

In the end, the concept began to take on a life of its own, and any coordinated attempt to reign in the reactions seemed to push the narratives further into their own world. It was almost like the game telephone, where a story is whispered from one person to another. But instead of the story coming back to either of us, it went out on its own, and just kept going.

Here's a review of the show from the Nashville Scene.