Sara Corbett on Shea Hembrey in the NY Times Sunday Magazine.
What at first seems most striking about “Seek” is that it’s both odd and big. The artwork could fill several marble-floored pavilion halls in Venice or at the Whitney. What’s most surprising, however, is the book’s final revelation — a brief note offered on the last page — that there aren’t, as it turns out, 100 artists. Nor are there two curators. The biennial catalog is itself a sort of meta-piece of art, and the artists represented are really only one artist — a guy who has chosen to bifurcate and fracture and channel himself in a hundred different ways. Every work in the book, in other words, was conceived of and handmade by a single person — a 37-year-old named Shea Hembrey — over a two-year period, in a mad and, he would tell you, somewhat desperate attempt to answer his own questions about what makes art meaningful.
