Harrell Fletcher was born in 1967 in Santa Maria, CA. He received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (1990), and a MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts (1994).

 

Harrell Fletcher has worked collaboratively and individually on a variety of socially engaged interdisciplinary projects for over a decade. He has exhibited at SF MoMA, the de Young Museum, The Berkeley Art Museum, and Yerba Buena Center For The Arts in SF, The Drawing Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, and Smackmellon in NYC, DiverseWorks and Aurora Picture show in Houston, PICA in Portland, OR, CoCA in Seattle, WA, and Signal in Malmo, Sweden. Fletcher is represented in San Francisco by Jack Hanley Gallery, and in NYC by Christine Burgin Gallery. He was a participant in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. In 2002 Fletcher started Learning To Love You More, a participatory web site with Miranda July.

 

 

 

 

 

 

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

Kara Hearn's re-enacted movie scenes, sort of based on a Learning To Love You More assignment

 

This is my understanding of how the videos came about. Kara had been working at Film Arts Foundation in San Francisco and she asked me to lead a workshop there on the topic of video and social practice based on my own working methods. Between the time that she scheduled the workshop with me and when it actually happened Kara had stopped working at FAF and started going to grad school at UC Berkeley to get her MFA. She decided to come to the workshop anyway. During the first day I showed the class various examples of video projects by a variety of artists who have social components to their work including Alyse Emdur, Will Rogan, Anne Deams, and Arthur Bradford. I also talked about the participatory web site, Learning To Love You More, that I created with Miranda July and Yuri Ono. Miranda and I come up with what we call assignments that are then posted on the web site. These assignments range from writing your life story in less than a day to taking a picture of the sun. Anyone around the world can respond by following the assignment's instructions and doing a report, which is then archived on the web site. To date there are fifty-four assignments which we continue adding to, and over 4000 reports which are also always growing. I asked the workshop students to do a Learning To Love You More assignment of their choice and bring in the results to class, but somehow the next day was too busy and we never had a chance to look at the student's reports.

     I encouraged them to send them in to the web site anyway. A few days later I did a lecture at UC Berkeley and also meet with some of the MFA students there for studio visits. When I got to Kara's studio she showed me some of her past projects, but she seemed most excited about the report she had done based on my workshop assignment.  Kara had chosen to do Assignment #47 Re-enact a scene from a movie that made someone else cry. We had posted a previous assignment that was to draw a still image from a movie scene that had made you cry. The second installment was to pick one of those scenes chosen by someone else, rent a copy of that movie, watch the scene and then act it out on video. Kara selected a scene from E.T. and had acted out all of the parts, five in total, herself. I thought it was a totally amazing piece, which made me feel uncertain whether to laugh or cry. Kara seemed really happy with it too. I encouraged her to do more reports based on the assignment. A couple of weeks later she emailed me to tell me she had done several more re-created scenes. She sent them into Yuri Ono who manages the Learning To Love You More site, and I anxiously waited to see them appear on the site. But then I got the news from Yuri that Kara had forgotten a step in the instructions, in all but the E.T. piece she had selected scenes from movies that had made her cry, not someone else. There were no drawings on the web site that corresponded to the new videos she had made. Miranda and I are very strident that everyone can participate in Learning To Love You More as long as they follow the instructions. Kara had left out a major aspect of the assignment, so we couldn't include them on the site. I was disappointed but asked her to send me a DVD of all of the videos so I could at least see them. The videos were all amazing in various ways, emotionally and technically. Kara turns out to be an adept actor, able to slip from one role to another with amazingly nuanced differentiations of character, accentuated with costume changes and props utilized from whatever she had around her house.