Untitled (House on Hillside)

It is simultaneously gritty and glossy, this world that Brandon Herman creates. Elements of the lush and optimal mixed with the imprecise and real, as if to point out that neither our wildest fantasies nor our true circumstances are ever fully excluded from our realities. It's unclear what direction the contradiction is heading; whether the ordinary is being idealized, or the chimerical is decomposing in front of us. If we looked away for a moment, would every trace of truth be consumed, leaving us with an image as flawless as a Hollywood movie? Or would it work the other way; the sublimity running like wet paint, seeping away to reveal something awful?

Here are houses, but with wilderness in between them. This wilderness is where lost boys adventure, but what else is in there? Where vision is obscured, a predator is sensed. And again, the confusion...as we scan the brush, are we on the hunt, or being hunted?

Why is Herman showing us these houses? There is foreboding in the specificity. The sky is somber; its color murky. It looms above the center home's orange glow, the warmth of which is a misleading invitation, identified only too late as a signal lit in warning of impending doom, the flame of which is about to sputter and die out. —Catalog excerpt