Jonathan Herder

In Stampology, the postage stamp–a recurrent element throughout Jonathan Herder's work over many years–is offered full embrace. These most recent works–utilizing U.S. stamps printed primarily between the 1940's and 1970's–are collaged from minute dissected and recombined fragments. Emphasizing the pastoral landscape, these works carry forth some of the topical idealism native to the source material. Despite ostensible evocations of beauty and grandeur, they seem to evoke a vague air of peril through these diminutive windows onto the mythic American landscape, pitting the individual against the vast indifference of unbridled space. Herder's predilection for "liberating the graphic potency of the monumental from the mundane confines of bureaucratic purpose so as to allow a less gravitational flirtation with seductive states of certainty, the sublime, and the heroic" is in evidence in the other works in this show, including taxonomical charts 'outlining' formal conditions of didacticism, or "grounds for certainty." (Herder, 2003)

Jonathan Herder
stampology