It’s easy to see “Oliver Herring: Areas for Action,’’ at the brand new Emerson Urban Arts: Media Art Gallery, as simply delightfully silly, but Herring has a deeper agenda. In his works, the rubrics behind painting, performance, 3-D, photography, video, and even drawing converge.
Last May, the artist invited the public to participate in performance events that he orchestrated, photographed, and videotaped. Participants spat colored water at each other; they threw around piles of glitter. They got to play like toddlers and get gloriously messy.
In the resulting photos and videos, Herring transforms people into sculptural material and canvases for pigment.
The photo “Areas for Action, Boston: Narrative Channeling Mondrian/ red yellow blue/ vertical’’ has both: Shot from above, it depicts three reclining bodies molded together and covered with color. Employing an old painter’s trick, Herring used tape to mask areas, then sprayed on paint and peeled the tape off to reveal another color beneath.
Those surprisingly straight lines crisscross over the performers’ bodies and onto the floor. The flat format of the photo lets the lines suggest modernist crispness even as they play against curves, folds, and bumps of flesh and clothing.
Never losing a sense of the ridiculous, Herring wittily finds trap doors in tropes such as grids, portraiture, action painting, and figurative sculpture.
The spat-out colored water places performers in the midst of a seeming Pollock-in-progress, morphing an action painting into a performance art/installation scene. Herring applies glitter to a portrait of an already sparkly young person, and the twinkling surface complicates perceptions of depth even as it suggests an aura the subject projects. Cuts he makes in some photos resemble drawn lines and create shallow reliefs, turning photos 3-D.
Often, it looks like the performers are having a blast. Herring has his own, shuffling the old cards of art’s classifying systems into a novel new deck.
OLIVER HERRING: AREAS FOR ACTION
At Emerson Urban Arts: Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery St., through Dec. 3. 617-824-8667, www.emerson.edu/urban-arts
Cate McQuaid can be reached at catemcquaid @gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter @cmcq.
