_Bio Jeremy Herndl was born in Surrey, BC in 1972 and now lives in Victoria, BC. He earned his BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art in Design in 1996 and his MAA in Painting at Emily Carr University in 2011.
Jeremy Herndl has received grants from the Canada Council, the BC Arts Council as well as three grants from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation. He has been artist in residence at the Banff Centre, the 2015 Brucebo Residency recipient, the Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, Eden Grove AiR, The Empire of Dirt in Creston, BC and the Pouch Cove residency in Pouch Cove, NL.
His work has been exhibited at Michael Gibson Gallery, the Surrey Art Centre, Open Space Art Society, Two Rivers Gallery, and Legacy Gallery at UVIC. His work is in collections including Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Surrey Art Centre, The University of Victoria, the Brucebo Foundation, Sweden, The City of Surrey, The Alberta Foundation for the Arts, The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, corporate and private collections in Canada, USA and Europe.
_Approach The research of Jeremy Herndl centres around current discourses about human interactions with the more-than-human world. He is interested in the phenomenological concept of perception as being reciprocal and in cultivating the mindfulness required to be fully observant and responsive by painting directly from observation. This, he finds challenging considering his own difficulty paying attention and the myriad distractions of the ‘connected’ existences of contemporary life. Herndl’s research based practice attempts to push through distraction and uses representation as an armature for responding to animate, mutable appearance. Throughout the day, as light and colour changes the appearance of things he indexes those changes in the painting and, in this way, the painting is emergent and expressive. Herndl says this interaction is rapport building and it generates a feeling of empathy. In his practice, he asks if is it possible to be a collaborator with place and is the resulting artwork a mutual expression?
_Project For this project Jeremy Herndl intends to use the studio as a base and to create his work in the surrounding areas close to the museum. The paintings will take several days each to make. The work created will focus on scenes where human and non human elements coalesce and over the duration of the making of the work, Herndl will try to index the changing appearance of the place (light/colour). The work will be made in public and the artist will engage with them as he explores the possibility of rapport with place through this social approach to painting. While much of the work will be done outdoors, some will also be done in the studio.
