RULE Gallery presents By Degrees, Other Shapes Emerged, Linda Herritt’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and her first at the Marfa location.
Bringing together recent fabric wall installations and works on paper, the exhibition follows language as it moves between reading, seeing, and hearing. Herritt uses words as both structure and image, stretching, layering, and partially obscuring narrative fragments until they sit somewhere between statement and abstraction.
The opening reception will be on Friday, August 7, from 6 to 8 p.m. with the artist in attendance, at RULE Gallery, 204 E. San Antonio Street in Marfa.
Throughout her practice, Herritt has used language to organize visual space. Earlier installations were built from lists: bands playing in Brooklyn, prescription drug side effects, dog commands, and lipstick color names. These texts mapped a particular cultural field while providing an architecture for the work. In the recent wall installations, that structure has begun to loosen, and the work now points more clearly toward the possibility of a story.
Since 2021, Herritt has gathered fragments from her reading and carried them into wall-based fabric constructions. The newest works draw from the novels of Charles Dickens. Removed from their original settings, phrases such as “Periodic clinks and thumps,” “At length the whispering ceased,” and “By degrees, other shapes emerged,” arrive as evidence of something already underway. The source is withheld, as are the events that came before and whatever might happen next. What remains is a brief disturbance in the room: a sound, a shift, or an image beginning to emerge.
Fabric gives this language a physical presence. Herritt stains and dyes the material before recombining it into lettered structures. Frayed edges and soft surfaces press against the geometry of the text. Some words remain clear. Others bend into patterns, disappear into camouflage, or extend beyond the wall. The work never settles fully into reading or looking. Meaning appears, then gives way to shape.
The works on paper carry that instability into a smaller scale. In watercolor monoprints such as Rainbow Accent, Uncertain, Unquiet, and Rain and Other Elements, words drawn from weather and other natural phenomena gather within earthy fields of color. The monoprint process records each brushstroke, yet the language remains unsettled. Letters overlap, distort, and recede, so language behaves less like a caption than an atmospheric condition passing across the page.
Across the exhibition, Herritt offers no complete narrative. She holds language at the point where it begins to suggest more than it can explain. A sound has just been heard. An image is coming into focus. A sentence has broken free from its original story. The result is a narrative without resolution. Meaning surfaces, disappears, and returns in another form.
The exhibit will be on view from August 7 – September 26. RULE’s hours are Wednesday–Saturday, 11 a.m.–5 p.m.
About the artist: Linda Herritt lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her text-based installations and works on paper have been presented in solo and two-person exhibitions at RULE Gallery, Denver; the Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Connecticut; The Boiler and Pierogi, Brooklyn; 1K Project Space, Amsterdam; the San Francisco Art Institute; the Frist Center for the Arts, Nashville; and Art & Idea, Mexico City. Her work has also been exhibited at the Drawing Center, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Denver; Arti et Amicitiae, Amsterdam; Galería OMR, Mexico City; and the Tokyo National Museum. Herritt has received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Printmaking, Drawing, and Book Arts; a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant; a Rockefeller Foundation Grant; an NEA Sculpture Fellowship; and a Brooklyn Arts Fund Award. Her residencies include Yaddo, MacDowell, Art Omi, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, Dieu Donné, and the International Artist in Residence Program in Vienna. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, and Art in America. She received her MFA from the University of Montana and her BFA from Ohio State University.
