Raised in a midwestern amusement park, Jonn Herschend is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker and experimental publisher whose work explores fiction, reality and the narrative structures that we employ as a way to explain the chaos and clutter of our everyday lives. Herschend’s videos, performances, installations, and photos all incorporate sterile and formally recognizable structures such as PowerPoint presentations, academic lectures, photographic evidence, infomercials, gallery exhibitions, or educational videos. The artist uses these structures as a means to investigate the issues of truth and confusion, and allows the messiness of reality to eventually collapse the whole piece.
Herschend’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Telluride Film Festival; SITE Santa Fe; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He is the co-founder and co-editor, along with Will Rogan, of the experimental publication THE THING Quarterly, and is a recipient of a Danish Arts Council grant for his work as co-curator, along with Heidi Hove, of the Deadpan Exchange international exhibition series. He is a 2014 Fleishhacker Eureka Fellow and 2013 recipient of the SFMOMA SECA Award. The artist has been a visiting lecturer at the University of California Berkeley, San Francisco State University, California College of Art and Stanford University and currently teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute. Herschend is at work on a feature film.