Hershmanlandia: The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson
November 5, 2005 - January 29, 2006

Lynn Hershman Leeson. Roberta’s Construction Chart #1, 1974.
Dye transferred print. Courtesy the artist.

For thirty-five years, San Francisco artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson has explored vision, spectacle, spectatorship, and their roles in the construction of sexed subjectivity. With Hershmanlandia: The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson, the Henry Art Gallery will present the first major survey of this important American artist.
Prolifically expressed in drawings, paintings, photographs, performances, robotic works, digital art, videos, films, interactive multimedia installations, and artificial intelligence works, Hershman Leeson's project of self-analysis and self-mythification multiplies and refracts fictional identities through her artwork to the point of exploding any stable notion of identity. The trajectory of her work provides a vivid artistic mirror of issues related to fragmented human subjectivity in our time.

Hershmanlandia is a space both real and virtual. It is populated by the multiple female personas and agents that have embodied Hershman Leeson's key concepts and concerns: the construction of sexed identity in relation to vision, spectacle and spectatorship; interactivity; the relationship between bodies and machines; and shifting ideas of the real and the virtual. While past exhibitions have often focused on the artist's technological innovations in new media, Hershmanlandia elaborates these themes which have preoccupied Hershman Leeson throughout her career.

For decades, Hershman Leeson has maintained separate practices in visual arts and film. Recently, she has brought these two streams together in compelling ways by linking the character Ruby from Teknolust, her recent feature film, with Agent Ruby, an artificially intelligent Web agent that exists on a multitude of platforms. Hershmanlandia provides a timely reassessment of Hershman Leeson's contributions to contemporary art, feminist theory, emerging technologies, and the full range of 21st-century creative endeavor.

Robin Held
Associate Curator, Henry Art Gallery

Accompanying the exhibition is The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson: Secret Agents, Private I, a major co-publication of the University of California Press and the Henry Art Gallery, to be distributed by University of California Press, and which will be available in fall 2005. This catalogue is the first critical monograph on the artist, and features a foreword by Hershmanlandia curator Robin Held and critical essays on Hershman Leeson's visual art, new media, and film by art historians/curators Amelia Jones, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Jean Gagnon, Steve Dietz, and Meredith Tromble, and by film theorists David E. James, Marsha Kinder, and B. Ruby Rich.

Hershmanlandia: The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson is organized for the Henry Art Gallery by Robin Held. Major support for this exhibition has been provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; the Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, City of Seattle; the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation; and donors to the Henry Art Gallery Contemporary Art Fund. In-kind support is provided by Grand Hyatt Seattle, Pyramid Breweries, The Stranger and KEXP 90.3 FM. Special thanks to Donald M. Hess and the Hess Collection.